June 22, 2015
I Can See For Miles and Miles ....: Day 20 - Drumheller to Cereal Alberta
One night when we were sitting around our campsite with Bill a few weeks ago and talking about the rest of the trip, Kirsten said "We'll be going through places like Cereal. Who stays in places like Cereal?"
Well, we do.
We also knocked off our first century ride after just missing out yesterday. Have to say though that the conditions are ideal for doing that. Flat to small rolling hills, moderate temp, tailwinds and good roads. Oh, and a powerful stoker too!
We didn't plan on riding this far today, but when the three hotels in Youngstown (at the 135 km mark) turned out to be chimera's ( was that Youngstown PA rather than AB you were Googling?) you just keep pedalling. There was a campground at Youngstown we could of stayed at but there we no services other than outhouses, and the clincher, there didn't appear to be anywhere to get a cold beer.
Decision made. Pedal another 35 km and take our chances with the Cereal hotel.
Not exactly a jackpot, but a room, a shower and a bar with cold beer and a pretty good BLT. No internet so pics later.
A bit of a tangential rant. We really wanted a place to have a shower tonight. Yesterday we camped at a very nice campsite just across the river from downtown Drumheller. Very nice, but also very pricey, and to top it off the showers were a looney ($1) for five minutes! Partly out of principle, and amazingly after cycling 153 km that day but getting soaked half way through, we felt we didn't need a shower, so we didn't have one.
Today's a different day, hotter with clear skies, and we definitely needed a shower today. As a result we are in lovely downtown Cereal.
We also came to the realization that the early starts we got all the way through BC were due the efforts of Mr Bill Sawyers. Now that we're left to our own devices, we got off at the crack of 10:30, even later than yesterday. Part of the reason was that I had to do some maintenance work on the drive chain (quick link wasn't set properly, a 2 minute fix job on a regular bike but a bit more complicated with a tandem with an internal geared hub and two eccentrics). This is a bit of an excuse, the reality is we are just slow in the morning.
Once we got going we decided to just take hwy 9 all the way rather than what looked to be a more scenic route down the river for 20 or so km's and then turning north to connect with hwy 9. In retrospect we should have gone with the more interesting option at the route out of Drum on hwy 9 had narrow shoulders with RUMBLE strips designed by that Dumbass character from BC. In all we had about 40 km's of this over the day. The remaining 120 km's were good wide shoulders with good pavement. Why can't they make them all like this?
The country side sure changed through the day too. We started in the Badlands, dramatic cliffs, coulees and hoodoos. Then came good farmland and rolling hills and then to basically alkaline scrubland. The prosperity of the farms was directly related to the quality of the land.
Communities are pretty widely spaced here and we were at 80 km's before we got to the first real town at Hanna. Now every one in Calgary knows that Hanna is the hometown of Lanny McDonald, a star hockey player from the 80's, but does Hanna boast about this on their town sign?
Nope. Hanna shouts out to the world that they are "Proudly the Home of Nickleback". I guess everyone has to come from somewhere.
There was a really nice grocery store there though and we procured our lunch, chocolate milk (the fuel of choice for this trip), sandwiches, watermelon 'cause it's getting hot and cold fizzy drinks. As we sat in the sun at 2:30 eating all this, little did we know that our day was only half done!
No worries though, with a tailwind the tandem really hauls and before we knew it, the bright light(s) of Cereal were beckoning.
No internet so pics later (there are some good ones, and to those who think the prairies are flat and boring, jump on bike and find out that they're not!)
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Song of the day:
The Kiss (Saskatoon) by James Keelaghan and Oscar Lopez ..... A song about a teenage kid going back and forth along this highway to Saskatoon on a Greyhound bus, something that I did every summer through high school when I worked on my uncles farm (and where my dad grew up). "It was somewhere east of Hanna, where the hills begin to rise, I was riding shotgun for the driver, drinking cokes and telling lies ....". Some may find the song a little schmaltzy, but it resonates with me.
Historical Monument of the day:
Another official "Alberta's History" roadside story board telling a brief history of the Palliser expedition in the mid 1800's that mapped out the area from here through the Rockies and also provided much more detailed geographic, geologic, botanical and zoological information than was previously known. Last week as we sped down from Bow Summit, we passed Mt. Hector and Hector lake, both of which were named after the chief geographer and geologist of the Palliser expedition.
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Today's ride: 168 km (104 miles)
Total: 1,749 km (1,086 miles)
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