After having taken 5 days off to support Vince at Ultraman Canada, I was back on the road with a "short, easy" ride to Vernon. On the map it's just ~120km - and while the first section to Kelowna is somewhat hilly there aren't any major passes or anything like that - just a couple of moderate to large climbs up to Summerland and again out of Peachland. I remembered the 2nd half being a lot flatter, with some rolling and a hill just outside of Vernon. Again, nothing to write home about.
I had breakfast with a Jordan - who'd just gotten back into town the night before, raced back to the house to pack up my stuff and say goodbye to Vince, Christine and Jen, and then rolled out at around noon. Later than I had planned, but them's the breaks.
It was windy. Not a "killer" wind, but windy enough that I was pedaling down all the hills at between 35 and 45kph (normally I'd just tuck and hit anywhere from 60-85). There was a pretty stead head/cross that stayed with me all day. It was sunny and warm, but not oppressively hot - I'd guess low 30s. Pretty close to perfect riding conditions (would have been perfect if I could have turned that wind around!).
I stopped at a fruit stand in Summerland for a Powerade and a butter tart. The butter tart was pretty good - not as good as that one I had last year in nowhere, ON, and thus not as good as one would find at Tartine - but still pretty damned good nonetheless. With my fuel stores topped up I carried on.
I was making decent time and on the final climb to Summerland (I think) there was a truck pulled over on the side of the road. A man wearing what looked to be one of those yellow/green neon safety vests was standing beside the truck - but he wasn't working or doing anything - he was just watching me climb. As I got closer he threw both hands up in the air and I started to laugh, realizing that it was Vince - emulating what I'd been doing all weekend. He offered me a beer handoff and when I stopped to ask what he was doing so far back (they had left nearly an hour before me) he told me that they had stopped in Summerland for lunch. He offered me water/Gatorade, but I had just topped up so I didn't need anything. Vince took off, and I rode on.
I made West Bank in ~2:40, and noticed that I was starting to feel a bit tired. Hmmm - maybe I'm more fatigued from the weekend than I had thought. Nothing to do but ride on, so ride on I did. Getting through West Bank seemed to take longer than I thought and it was just over 3hrs by the time I hit Kelowna.
Vince had told me about they hwy97 bypass which allows cyclists to skirt around the abortion of a job they've done to the city where the main highway cuts through the center of town. It's truly a horrible thing - "town planning" at its absolute worst. I can't think of an uglier stretch to a nice city anywhere in North America. Squamish seems keen to try their hand at it as well, but though that's no work of art they've (thankfully) got a long way to go before they reach the Kelowna "standard". If Squamish is my highschool physics teacher, Kelowna is Stephen Hawking.
It took pretty much forever to get through Kelowna. It's not the fault of the bypass, which is a nice jaunt through mostly residential streets with a full bike lane nearly the entire way. It wasn't even the fault of the wind, which somehow managed to be in my face no matter which way the route turned. I just had no legs. I didn't feel like I had bonked, but I was tired and unable to produce any power. Finally I rolled up to a grocery store and got another Powerade, and hit up the McDonalds for a Coke ($1 any size, all Summer long!) I sat down on the curb under the shade of a tree for a little while and figured that I wouldn't hit my estimated time of reaching Vernon at 18:00.
That time was significant only because I had made plans to call Carl when I got to town and had told him that I figured I'd be there by ~18:00. I figured I'd call him at 18:00 wherever I was - and just hoped that I'd be able to describe my location well enough for him to know where I was.
From there it remained a slow slog. No power, not much energy, and just feeling generally beat up. My L ankle was bothering me again, and earlier on in the day I had noticed that some of the injuries I sustained when I crashed six days prior were still bothering me. My L palm hurt in the drops, my L pinky and ring fingers hurt, and my R knee was less than "normal" - but what was bothering me the most was my R chest. I must have done some compression damage or pissed off the intercostals when I crashed, because it SUCKS. Pushing up off the bars, breathing deeply, rolling over in bed, reaching for stuff... it all hurts. For the first 4 days I was terrified of coughing or sneezing. Ah well - what can you do but just keep rolling?
I called Carl at 18:05 at the top of Predator Ridge and was pleased to learn that I was only ~10km out of Vernon - with most of that being downhill. I had seen a town on the lake as I climbed the ridge, but refused to allow myself to think that was Vernon. He said "I'll see you in ~20" and I got back on the bike to finish up the day. Carl was waiting for me at the bottom of the hill and we loaded my gear into the back of the Subaru. Then he whisked me off to his ranch down near Coldstream - SouthEast of Vernon proper, where Kerry was waiting. They had an absolutely ridiculous amount of food waiting there for me, with organic free range beef from their own steer (raised on the ranch) and sausages made by their neighbour.
An incredible meal, followed by us staying up way too late catching up and we all crashed at around 02:00. Poor Carl had to get up early the next day for work. Kerry works from home, and I just had to get up whenever and keep moving down the road. Revelstoke is the next planned stop, followed by Golden.
Stats:
Total Elapsed Time: 6:40
Total Ride Time: 5:44
Distance: 124.33km
Avg Speed: 21.6kph
Max Speed: 67.2 (achieved on the descent into Vernon)
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