Day 3 - Eagle Plains to Ogilvie

This was a bit of a death march.  Early season fitness aka no fitness was starting to take its toll.  We were all feeling pretty good until a long climb out of the Ogilvie River lowlands put us back out into the exposed and windy high mountain range.  Dawit was feeling very sick and tired for the last 20km.  He promptly went to bed without eating and slept most of the next 36 hours.

----->Daily Strava<-----

Day 2 - Rock River to Eagle Plains

I think by this point everyone was starting to suffer from cell phone withdrawals.  Also we were feeling pretty tired from the first day of riding.  There would be no reprieve on day 2 as we did a whole lot of windy mountain riding out of Rock River.

Riding parallel to the mountains for a few hours provided us with a relentless side wind that had a bit of a chill to it too.  In the back of my mind I was happy that the weather was still much nicer than it was when we were driving out to our starting point.  A few drops of rain reminded us of that as well.  We stayed dry though and after a really fun downhill to the Eagle River we finished our day with a steep and long climb up to the pseudo civilization of Eagle Plains.

----->Daily Strava<-----

Day one - Dip one

Day one of our Triple Dip adventure started at the Peel River. The ferries to Inuvik were still about 7 days away from being open due to some mechanical issues so we decided that 150km north of the Arctic circle was as close to the Arctic ocean as we were going to get.

We were met with some pretty incredible mountain riding less than 5km after leaving the river bank with a lot of uphills and not very many downhills. We had a quick lunch on top of a mountain at the Northwest Territories border. We were feeling pretty tired but the wind was howling and we knew we had to keep moving to get to shelter.  We rode what thankfully seemed like a short, mostly downhill 20km to our very nice campsite at Rock River.

And yes there were some brave dippers!

Our home for the night - Rock River campsite

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We changed out the clutch on Wonton

Ever wonder what a 300,000km original clutch looks like??  Watch Dawit and I change out the clutch on Wonton to get it ready for our epic cross continent ride.

Testing out some rain gear :-D

Trying out some of the gear I will have on hand for those less than favourable days in the saddle during my cross Canada ride.

Triple dip - cross continent ride. Stage 7 (The end)

Planned for August 12 - 31

Well it's been a long journey thus far but the end is almost in sight.  It feels like a lifetime since this virtual trip started.  I'm sure the real thing will go by much faster.......
This part of the route is open to interpretation and depends on a few factors.  Okay really just one factor.  What day in August it is when we actually get here.  There are definitely plans to go across PEI and also to spend a while in Newfoundland.  However we'll just say it ends in Sydney for now, how we get to St John's is still a mystery (though I'm sure it will involve a ferry).

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Triple dip - cross continent ride. Stage 6

Planned for August 4 - 12.

Here we go right through my home town, Peterborough.  Google says it's the best way to go so who am I to argue.  Admittedly for the first time while posting these maps I used the handy bicycle feature on Google and it looks to be routing us on a bunch of sections of the Trans Canada Trail which would be really cool.  Not sure how easy that would be to program into my Garmin, judging from my history of trying to get my Edge 1000 to work properly I can tell you that it will probably be extremely frustrating ;-)
The end is really sneaking up on us here though I'm not sure it will feel that way during the ride.  We finish stage 6 in Drummondville Quebec.

-----> Click here to see the map <-----