August 20 – 23, 2015

What happened…

Amanda writes:

August 20

We had a nice shorter ride into Radium. I had wanted to stop at the hot springs at least to take a picture but Andrew decided he didn’t want to. It’s times like these that I need to push a bit harder to stop and say, okay wait here please while I go in. I say that because I was a bit annoyed that we didn’t stop when originally he said we would stop and look. Oh well, another time then.

We arrived at our warm showers host quite early and they were so kind to invite us in early. Andrew had stayed with them on his last trip through and everyone seemed happy to see each other again. We went into town and had some lunch, visited one of the cool tourist attractions and then came back and did laundry. Then we were able to sit back and swap travel stories. I love days like this.

August 21

Today sucked. We started the day with my front rack breaking … again. We were able to sort of patch it together and we headed down the road to Invemere to hit a hardware store to find something more substantial to try and temporarily fix it. Upon arrival at the Home Hardware the skies opened and I realized I had another freegin flat tire.

Andrew got to work on fixing the rack as best he could and then I tried to fix the flat. I didn’t do a very good job because it was still flat after re-installing the wheel so we did it again. After doing the tire a second time it was still pouring rain so we decided to head to Tim Hortons to hang out, have some warm lunch and try and wait out the storm.

Once at Timmy’s we logged in and realized that our post regarding the positive pregnancy test had hit the internet. There were so many comments and so much interest, frankly I was a bit surprised. It taught me a few things.

1. A picture can tell a story on it’s own.
2. Some people make assumptions based on a picture and don’t actually read our posts.
3. Andrew and I needed to talk about this event a bit more.

The reactions to the post really stirred up some emotions for Andrew that I wasn’t prepared for. When I found out I was pregnant there was only one outcome of the situation in my mind. As I’ve said before I have never wanted to have kids and this was not in the cards for me. When Andrew saw all the congratulations comments, he was reminded of how excited he was. I realized that in my focused efforts of dealing with the situation that I wasn’t a very good listener to how he felt. We ended up getting into an argument and then road bikes in the pouring rain having not finished talking about it and being angry with each other. I can’t remember seeing Andrew that emotional about something for a long time and I realized I can be a better listener. We managed to talk before falling asleep but we certainly still have more to discuss. From a blogging perspective the whole thing also had Andrew questioning why he writes because we felt like most people just looked at the picture and didn’t read how we felt. He declared he has no intention of writing anymore until he does some thinking.

August 22

Today we road from one wild camp spot to another. We woke up arguing and continued pretty much the entire day if that is possible. Being at odds with your loved one is exhausting. We still couldn’t see eye to eye on some things and couldn’t seem to be civil to each other. Frankly I can’t even tell you what the road was like because we just road and tried to talk occasionally which invariably ended up in some snarky comment from one of us. Neither of us were innocent on this endless battle.

August 23

Enter another shitty day. We were almost able to be civil to each other to begin the day and agreed that fighting was silly. We both agreed to try and improve at certain things and we know that relationships take work. I thought the day was going to be better but by the time we managed to load up the bikes we were at it again. We really did try to be civil with each other and as the day progressed we improved. Then some more snarky comments just put things over the top. We had managed to be somewhat level headed with each other but there’s a breaking point; and today we hit it.

This was followed by 3 bloody flat tires and another broken rack; this time on Andrew’s bike. Andrew had a huge screw in his tire that has done some damage to his tire that might compromise the life of it. After that he got another pinch flat because our pump doesn’t pump up high enough. Our third flat happened on my bike much later in the day and again was one of those; are you kidding me moments?

In true I’m angry and making silly decisions fashion we decided we were hell bent to make it to Fernie on this day so we broke more rules. We road over 6 hours, we were on the road for over 10 hours and we road in the dark. The only saving grace was that a fellow we met in Canmore who had offered to put us up actually answered his cell phone at 9:30 p.m. on a Sunday night and agreed to take us in. We arrived after 10 p.m. and Mike welcomed us with open arms, cold beers and good conversation.

Today’s Photographs