Chuck:
Yesterday, I forgot to tell about my crash, minor but somewhat embarrassing. As I wheeled into the RV park, I saw Betty walking Mitzie across a gravel road and parking area. I said “Hi Ya” and slowed as I rolled up to them. As usual, I kicked out of one of the cleats with my right foot. Braking on gravel is tricky, the bike skidded to the right and laid downward on the left, but my left foot was still locked in the cleat. So down on the gravel I went at a speed of about 3 mph. Bikers say if you use cleats (almost all road bikers do), there are those bikers who have fallen due to a lockup and those who will. I have done this two times before, I always try to arrange it so I have an audience. A guy camped right behind our rig was walking about 50 feet away, he looked over as I hit the gravel, but , when he saw I was OK he had the decency to look the other way. My first fall like this was about 24 years ago, the next about 12 years ago; once every dozen years or so seems to keep me in practice.
Today we continue north on Canada Highway 43 which will eventually become the Alaska Highway (aka AlCan Highway) in Dawson Creek. Within minutes I was crossing the Athabasca River, a major Canadian river rich with history of exploration, fur trading and early settlements. Its headwaters are in the Rockies hundreds of miles to the SW, it flows NE hundreds of miles to Lake Athabasca. The area all around us is heavily forested and logging operations use this highway to get timber to the mills. Oil is the other big industry in this area. Both these activities are in primitive areas with minimal roads, the result is that lotsa mud gets tracked onto “my highway” and I have to ride thru it. It rained most of this afternoon making the situation worse. My bike and I were a mess when I rolled into our roadside camp in Fox Creek this afternoon. It took longer to clean the bike than to clean me.
Now it is about 10 pm and raining again. Plus, we just lost the use of our water pump. I checked all the breakers, even tried the red neck method ‘tap it with a hammer’. We will pursue this in the morning, when the rain has stopped. (Late breaking news: the hammer trick must have worked it was operating just as we were going to bed).