Ride Summary

Distance: 33 mi / 53 km

Climbing: 1106 feet / 337 m

Descending: 2810 feet / 856 m

Difficulty: medium-easy

Link to workout in Strava

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Perhaps the most interesting part of yesterday evening and this morning was the RV park host, Markus, who retired to this spot on a mountaintop less than 5 miles from the US, and has big dreams for building an off-grid cabin community on his land, but "not a long hair dope smoking nobody does anything" kinda place. He seemed like good people and I hope to bring Lori up sometime while we're staying with my sister who has a place about 1.5 hours due south in Washington state. The road riding here is, well, pretty much the highway but there are some mountain bikeable trails around that we might check out. I slept like a baby ("it's the altitude!" said Markus) and awoke rested and took my time getting onto the road today, since I knew I didn't have a ton of riding to do before the end of the day.

Strava tells me it was one of my fastest rides for the first 10 miles - as it was mostly downhill for the first 10 miles :). Zoomed down without incident into a couple small forgotten towns, one of which had a cute museum mostly about the kettle valley railway which ended in that town (Midway) but also just about area history, in which I read many placards, climbed to the top of a caboose (that little "hut" on top is seats for the caboose-man to be able to look out over his train!), and became glad that I was not biking like the rail guys did:

...since my noodle arms wouldn't be a ton of use pumping that thing down the rails!

Rolled into town in a kinda hot still afternoon, but the hotel of my dreams (actually: google searched) was accommodating! So, I got cleaned up, did some sink laundry since there was no laundromat in town, and then walked down to the patch of businesses so I could get fed, and found enough cell signal there to call Lori and chatted for a half hour.

Apropos of nothing: I found this juxtaposition funny:

Tomorrow is a not-bad-looking day; the following day is another brutal climb though! So, while I'll take all good vibes at any time, I really need them the day after tomorrow (particularly in the morning since the climb is first 25 miles out of town).!

Note for the non-nerds reading: the strava link at the top has a map so you can see where I am even if I forget to say :)