June 18, 2015
Digest and get ready for the Primo course: Days 16-18 - Reset in Calgary and Canmore
We spent the last three days between Calgary and Canmore moving things along on our reno in Canmore, visiting with Callum (our son) and friends in both places.
The next leg of our trip we plan to do on our tandem, so we also spent some time consolidating our stuff from 8 panniers down to 4 with a rack bag. We left some of our cold weather gear behind and I dumped off some of my electronics (Samsung Tab 10.1 and my Olympus camera). I've found my new Iphone 6 to be good enough at web access and taking pictures that these other devices just sat in the bag, like ballast. No need to drag them along.
We got our single bikes packed up and sent to Sudbury by Greyhound (very reasonable, ~$200 for two bikes with insurance). We'll pick them up when we get there in about 8 weeks and ride them for the remainder of the trip.
I had an interesting day in Canmore yesterday. Canmore will be hosting a World Cup Biathlon race in February of next year, and Kirsten and I are volunteering (along with hundreds of others) to help organize and run the event. Kirsten will be much more involved than I will be, but yesterday there was a German television crew from ZDF visiting the Nordic Centre to evaluate how many cameras they would need and where they would be placed on the course.
I was asked to help them out with the course review . I thought it would be about 2 hours but it ended up being almost 6 as we walked all the various courses that races will be run on as they looked at camera angles analyzing what would likely be happening in each race at various locations, and hence where there would be good action for TV. All very new and interesting stuff for a petroleum engineer! It gave me much more appreciation for what goes into putting together a live sports broadcast.
When we run the race here, it will be great if we get more than a thousand spectators and even better if it gets shown in the local sports media let alone national media. By contrast, World Cup races in Germany can draw up to 90,000 spectators and the tv audience is in the tens of millions! It's a completely different perspective on the sport.
Anyway, bags are repacked, the tandem is loaded and ready to go so it's off to bed. Tomorrow we get up and pedal east into a new dawn (sorry for the cheesy metaphor, but it's true!).
Some random shots from the last few days:
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