The long ride home

Keith

Leah and I had been keeping an eye on the forecast with the intention of either heading to Kamloops and heading up highway 5 and home, possibly staying one more night along the way or, heading into Golden and Kicking horse and completing the Via Ferrata course on mountain. Both directions we found that rain and cool temperatures were being called for so we made the painful decision that we would power home. With the decision made we quickly packed up camp and headed into town for a bite to eat and coffee.

We soon hit the highway and headed into Glacier National park. Usually I enjoy this drive even though its on one of the busiest sections of the BC portion of the trans Canada. This time the construction around the snow sheds made me crazy and was very happy to be clear of the area.

We soon passed through Glacier park and made our way into Golden for a quick fuel stop. We quickly hit the road again and burned through bypassing both Lake Louise and Banff as we both wanted to avoid the tourist traps. Making our way into Canmore and decided to go for a bite to eat. We decide on Grizzly paw brewing as both of us have heard good things about the food, their building was amazing! After lunch we hit the road readying ourselves for the insanity to come on highway 2.

Too our luck we passed through Calgary just before 5 pm beating the rush. We figured that we our next stop would be Red Deer but I really wanted to check out a new brewery that I heard about in Innisfail. The first one Google brought up was Dark Woods brewing, it seemed to be just down the road from where we fuelled up so we went in search. After circling the block a few times we finally noticed the sign for the brewery, it almost seemed to indicate that the brewery was in crawl space between the buildings. We both were read to leave when the brewer came out from the Napa building and informed us that the brewery had not been completed yet. He did invite us to come and try some samples off his pilot system. I look forward to seeing what Dark Wood has to offer once they get their system in place.

The other brewery in Innisfail that recently opened was Field and Forge found on the west side of town on highway 24. This was the most amazing brewery I’ve seen in Alberta with a full automated brew house and a ton of production capacity. We decided to have supper and share a flight of beer as it was getting late.

Hitting the road we made quick time up highway 2 and turned off just west of Millet. About a 1/4 mile down the road we both started to feel rain drops and decided that it may be a good idea to put the rain gear on one last time.

It was dark by the time we hit the south side of Beaumont and of course the bugs were out so not only did we get some rain but we were plastered with bugs by the time we made it home.

Our trip was done and today had to be the hardest day of riding the entire trip with us covering 690+ km. We were both happy to be home and even happier to have the chance to sleep in our own bed.

I will be posting our stats in a future blog post so stay tuned.