Rolling out of Lethbridge on Friday morning with a clean chain, clean windscreen, and clean lights (thanks, Ol' Trapper), my first two hours were through the countryside in full harvest. I passed this elevator-and-train moving picture at Barons. Shortly afterwards, just before Carmangay, I was cruising along maybe 150 metres behind a pickup truck when, poof! -- a cloud of dust and the rear left wheel separated from the truck, with the wheel slowly veering left, crossing the thankfully-empty opposite lane of the 2-lane highway, and rolling down the ditch and into a wheat field, where it appeared to continue on a gradual left-hand arc for an impressively long time. |
A little further down the road, I took a short rest stop checking out the Star Trek tourist trap in Vulcan, Alberta for the first time. From there, I crossed east on the 23 to Highway 2, then bypassed up around the south and west sides of Calgary to visit an old friend in the northwest end of the city for lunch (thanks again, Buddy!). Marching onward, I chewed another few hundred kilometres off of the northward journey, getting up to Edmonton for the night. I managed secondary highways from Calgary to as far north as Bowden (chasing the 766 as long as I could track it, with a nice tailwind), but then served time on the QEW in long-weekend Friday evening traffic. Arriving in the south end of Edmonton, I found a place to sleep, successfully accomplished an IKEA-to-Post-Office mission before close of business, then showered and found a good steak dinner (and, randomly, a work buddy) at the hotel restaurant, before getting locked out of my room for two-and-a-half hours at 11:00pm due to a failed electronic lock which required a maintenance guy to be summoned from a half-drunken golf party somewhere on the other side of Edmonton. This proved to be the final blow to my efforts to claw my daily schedule forward (and to get back on the same-day-blog train).
Day total: 583 km, 10h00m Trip total: 5,308 km | Start: Lethbridge, AB. End: Edmonton, AB. Soundtrack: Clockwork Angels, Matt Mays, foamies on the superhighway. |