Pete decided to hang with me for two more days before going back to work at Microsoft, so we planned our most aggressive drive yet, a whole 326 miles! We’ve discovered that stopping, taking pictures, smoking cigars, and generally enjoying ourselves is not conducive to covering ground β so we pretty much gave up covering a lot of ground.
Dave cooked us breakfast, and we lingered over coffee (since the border crossing we planned to use didn’t open until 9 am), and then the navigator (me) missed the turn off into Canada. On the way back, after a pleasant little half hour side trip, I found the curve, and promptly low-sided at 5 MPH in first gear. Luckily I had a wingman to help upright the bike and we were on our way. There’s a reason boys and girls that you wear the right gear!
The result was that we found ourselves finishing lunch at 1:30 a mere 60 miles from whence we started. We actually had to limit ourselves to only two stops to make Banff by 7:30. The last two hours of our drive were through Kootenay National Park. We saw deer, bald eagles, and bighorn sheep too numerous to keep count, and three moose (“mooses”Β if you are from the South). They were all so close to the road that I was praying “Lord, I know that I’ve asked to go on a moose hunt, but I really don’t want to kill one with a bike.”Β
If you haven’t been up here, this is a beautiful drive. Even in a cage, a hem, I mean a car.
We topped the evening off at Saltlick with a medium rare filet, and Pete took it upon himself to fulfill a personal request from Peter Madison.
