Fresh Meat Mondays

Aloha from the beautiful town of Nelson, British Columbia! After a week of camping through various mountain and forest locales, we’ve emerged from the woods to get a welcome dose of civilisation. The weather has been warm and humid, so you can imagine the glorious glory contained within our armpits yesterday when we arrived, sweaty, dusty and stanky from the bush. Pure glorious glory.

Breaking in the new boots the hard way

Just the bare essentials

Spray lake clarity

It’s been a great second week, with another 600 leisurely kilometres put on the bikes, although it started with an unexpected slip n slide on the deep gravel of Spray Lakes Road between Kananaskis and Canmore in the Rockies. Our bikes are tall, laden with our worldly possessions and we are learning all the time how to handle them in various conditions. We were doing about 60 km/hr, in close staggered formation, Mighty Ducks style, when we entered a patch of deep, loose gravel, likely laid down by an evil minded grader operator (Canada 1, Australia 1). I was in front and my bike fishtailed like that of a guy who’s about to crash his bike. I tried my best to look cool in front of Mark and pretended I was just changing a song on my MP3 player, and I think he bought it for a few seconds, but then ach! it was too much captain, and I ended up sliding on my right side for a while. Mark watched me do this with an icy stare of control and locked up his brakes to join the party. Actually he only had time to say “sshhhhpppbb” and ran his bike into my bike, causing him to fall on his left side. We were both wearing all our riding gear, which are full of elbow pads and robo cop jokes, so both came away relatively unharmed, just a bit shaken up, but most importantly full of new found respect for grader operators. The bikes however needed some field repair, so we putted along to the next campsite, which turned out to be a glorious location for some R’n’R!

Matt got a boo boo

Atley got a boo boo

Boo boo repair

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Stunning Spray Lakes at  Kananaskis

Happy with our Level 2 glue and duck tape repairs we hit the road again and headed west into BC. Mountains after rivers after waterfalls after curvy roads, fast roads, slow roads and gravel roads got us to the awesome little ski town of Golden. We camped by the river in town and soon made friends with the surrounding campers. We did a pub crawl to enjoy the sights of the town, with the intentions of seeking out Fresh Meat Mondays, but were sorry to hear that this revered tradition has since ceased. This made the pizza taste bad, so we retired back to the campground to carry on jovially with various campground characters.

Got wood?

We saddled up in the morning and hit the road in very comfortable and enjoyable riding conditions. Revelstoke filled our cases with food and we turned south to head towards the long skinny Kootney Lakes. A ferry ride took us over North Arrow Lake and we began the hunt for a free place to camp. The 3rd or 4th gravel road led us to a hippy hot springs healing resort and a group of sweaty, shirtless, middle-aged guys with far too much smiling and head nodding going on. We waited politely for them to nudge each other back into their cars and leave before chatting with the crystal wearing owner of the place, Maggie. She was all about motorbikes and hot springs and healing and offered her front lawn to camp on for $50, and even said she’d heal Mark. We countered her nodding with shaking and she was hip to our jive, baby. She gave us wacky hippy directions to some free camping and hot springs and 15 minutes later were heading down a logging road into some serious wilderness, wondering where the hell we were going.



We didn’t find a sign for B42 or the promised hot springs, but we did find a cool bridge in the middle of nowhere with an awesome crystal clear river rushing under it. We stupidly hadn’t had lunch, and it was late afternoon, hot and muggy, and Maggie had obviously cast a spell on us, because we were suddenly very much in need of some healing. So we decided this was it, and we set up camp on the side of the logging road and sat on the bridge waiting for the monsters to come.





If you go into the woods today....

Pannier camping stools

Level 3

From the wooded paradise we rejoined the highway and headed south for some awesome twisty roads and just another happy day riding motorbikes in the mountains. Pretty soon we reached Nelson and found the White House backpackers hostel, a find place to perform our bathing, washing and blogging requirements.

The White House Backpackers

With my writing now done, I shall wander into town in search of hippies and lunch. We're headed east now, to creston, cranbrook and ferny way. Peace!

And the video...