Last year I carved some time out of July to do a self-powered trip along the Silvery Slocan Circle Route. I did it counter-clockwise over three days, combining kayaking, running and road-biking. This year, with a new-to-me road bike recently acquired, I decided to do the same route all on two wheels. I rode clockwise for a switch, and over two relatively short days. The first day took me over the pass, through Kaslo, down the North Shore of Kootenay Lake to Nelson, for a total of about 112 km and 1700 metres of total climbing. The second day brought me home through the Slocan Valley, for about 100 km and a bit less climbing, about 1500 metres.
Because my overnight waypoint was the Nelson house, I was able to ride almost entirely unencumbered. I carried only water, snack, debit card, phone and my little bike toolkit. Knowing that all the comforts of home were already waiting for me in Nelson was almost as good as having a support team travelling with me!
The weather was great: cool but sunny. The seasons seemed to actually turn while I was riding. On Friday I had noticed that the birch leaves were looking paler as if they were getting ready to turn; by the time I arrived home on Sunday they were yellow and flying off the trees in the wind.
I like giving myself a multi-day solo challenge every year. It gives me time to just be with myself. I come out of it feeling like I’ve accomplished something, renewed. I think this is a tradition I’ll try to continue. I wonder what 2016’s challenge will be?
It was an early summer. The trees were greening up a good 3-4 weeks earlier than usual, and the season continued to unfurl early. The lake got “warm” (as warm as it ever does) in June. The wildfires were burning by the end of June. The huckleberries peaked in mid July. The wildflowers up Idaho peak were over before August began. And here it is September 2nd and the ‘late’ apples, pears and prune plums are ripening, the rains have socked in and the leaves are turning.
Symphony on the Mountain
And there has been a lot of water under the bridge. My mom came to visit. She’s really struggling with her rheumatoid arthritis, but a bit of prednisone helped take the edge off while she was here. She was able to be here when Erin performed a repeat of her grad recital locally. It was wonderful for us all to hear the maturity her playing has these days. She played the Debussy Sonata, Beethoven Sonata No. 7 and the Bach C Major solo sonata. She and I did the Symphony on the Mountain gig together in Kimberley. Kind of fun, and nice for me to get back to doing some symphony playing.
Fiona changed violin teachers. Although she really liked her previous teacher as a person, maybe the relationship was too casual: she just wasn’t feeling the drive to impress her, and maybe there was some trust lacking as well. She has had three lessons with the new teacher, and has said “She’s a little bit intimidating at first, but really nice, and she’s seasoned. You can tell she really knows what she wants, and how to explain it to me.” The new teacher is the one Erin went to for part of a year, who had to suddenly stop teaching when her husband got cancer. He’s well now, and she has returned to teaching in a very limited under-the-radar fashion. Fiona is one of three or four regular students she has. So far so good. We’ll get properly underway in a couple of weeks.
Ballet-specific physio
There has been physiotherapy. It has gone well. The tendons healed. The strength and flexibility have been very much compromised, though. There were several therapy sessions and lots of daily exercises prescribed. We had to drive to Spokane to get new pointe shoes and she’s now beginning some re-training exercises en pointe at home. She’s signed up for three two-hour days a week of ballet this year. Hopefully she’ll know enough to avoid pushing too hard as she comes back from this. She’s young and they start the year gradually: she’ll probably be fine. Gymnastics may be harder to approach as carefully.
The Uphill Cruiser, in progress: waiting on rubber and wicker
I started building a city bike, rehabilitating the Stumpjumper I bought in 1989 to try to get a couple of years of life out of it toodling around Nelson. I figure the mountain-climbing gears will be essential climbing 10% grades with payload. Eventually I hope to get an e-bike, but that’s hard to justify now when most of my travel is to transport kids.
Helping out at Dance Camp
Fiona wasn’t able to do dance camp, but she ended up being the teacher’s assistant at both the Music Explorers and age 6-11 dance camp. She was amazingly hard-working, helpful, pro-active and mature. Put in long days … up to 6 hours straight without any real break, herding children, helping with activities, doing prep and clean-up, redirecting problematic behaviour, supervising for safety.
Sophie and Noah have spent most of the summer in Nelson at the Mill St. house. Sophie has been working full-time at a café. She’s taken up longboarding. She’s got herself a twice-weekly paper delivery route. She shops, she cooks, she cleans, she’s been taking a Spanish course. She’s a maniac hard worker. Noah has spent much of the summer getting cold after cold, and when not sick playing D&D with his Nelson friends until the middle of the night. He’s also done some renovation and cleaning work on the Mill St. house. Spackling, washing everything with TSP, painting, carpet-underlay scraping, all that fun stuff.
SVI Play-in
SVI happened. It was over-the-top busy for me. Delegation is not my strong point. But Erin and Fiona were very helpful, and overall things ran smoothly. We had 95 students this year, the most ever, and with my grip on a local team of volunteer-parents slipping away now that I don’t teach locally, I struggled even more with asking for help. I managed to delegate one area, with rather less success than might have been due to my inability to relinquish control, but there is plenty of “room to grow” as they say.
We went to Ontario to visit my family and Chuck’s family. All six of us went, a miracle of planning and lucky timing. Erin was completing a Suzuki teacher training course in Waterloo, so we intercepted her there and managed visits here and there.
I biked as much as I could. The new bike has been fabulous. I got much stronger over time and decided there was no need for a bigger sprocket or smaller chainring. I just bought a used trainer, a Cycle Ops Fluid 2, and plan to keep riding in the garage even through worst of the fall rains and winter conditions. I have my iPhone rigged up on the aero bars for reading books. Also in the plans is a two-day Silvery Slocan bike ride, from one home to the other and back again.
And there’s been a bit of trail-running and mountain biking and alpine hiking. Not as much as any of us wished, but Fiona’s limited ambulatory capacity has put a bit of a crick in our style.
But there: that’s some of it anyway. And so we move onwards into fall.
Here’s our minivan. We bought it about 18 months ago and it transformed my driving experience. It made access to alpine hikes a breeze. Road trips and drive-in movies were awesome. I loved not having to hike in from the highway end of our driveway even once last winter, and knowing that winding mountain roads covered in snow were safer with our 4-wheel-drive and high ground clearance. The right-hand drive was easy to get used to, and while there are more and more of these beasts in the area, I also loved the mildly eccentric aura that it created around us. Fuel mileage has been pretty decent, and it’s a spacious and comfortable vehicle for five or more.
But the Delica is showing its age (it’s a 1994), especially since we’re such mileage-hogs. Our at-home family is smaller now, and I’m not driving five teenagers to choir practice anymore. In another month all three of my older kids will be in possession of driver’s Learners Permits (Erin and Noah having delayed attaining their full licensure due to a combination of temperament and lack of proximity to home). And really, what is the wisdom in having beginning drivers learn their basic skills in a right-hand-drive vehicle? So we’re planning to sell it and buy something new or new-ish. Something with all-wheel drive, but smaller and cheaper to maintain, considerably more fuel-efficient and with the driver’s seat on the left. I also like the idea of having airbags again. I’d like a few airbags. Hoping to make this a reality before winter hits full-force, since this is a pretty good time of year to be selling a snow-trampling monster minivan.
We’re now spending part of each week in a city. When we get to Nelson, we’ve been trying to leave the van parked at the house, and walk as much as we can. It’s been so much fun to poke our way around amongst the secret stairways and paths in a city where the terrain makes drivable roads a bit of an engineering challenge. Our house in Nelson is a mere 750 metres from downtown, but 100 metres above it with most of the elevation gain taking place over just 400 metres. Just getting home is a workout, and it’s a workout we tend to do at least a couple of times a day. The sidewalks run places roads can’t, and we love the feeling of winding our way amongst lovely homes and beneath hardwood trees with changing leaves, up “sidewalks” like the one pictured above.
So we’re spending three days a week in a walkable city, and when we’re home we hardly need to drive at all. We’re still doing two trips a week to Nelson, but soon that will be in a much smaller vehicle that gets double the mileage. Our carbon footprint should diminish dramatically in size this year.
So here’s how I felt on the third morning: revolting.
Jittery, feverish and nauseated.
The first day was amazing. I had rented a kayak from Smiling Otter in Slocan (my paddling destination) and brought it home the night before, depositing it on the lakeshore. I was on the trail before six for the short run to the lake, catching the first glints of sun sneaking through the Carpenter Creek valley.
First sun: my shadow crossing the Carpenter Creek bridge
It was a hot day but the lake was still in shade and I kept to the east side all morning, tucked into the shade of the mountains. I’d rented a solo touring kayak, much sleeker than our tandem, and made really good time. I’d allotted six to seven hours for the 27k paddle, and finished in four and change. Along the way I saw bald eagles, great blue herons, ospreys, mergansers and countless plovers, swallows, killdeers and such. The lake stayed completely calm until mid morning when some wind blew up. It was pushing me on my way, but the swells and chop were getting rough just as I was passing the cliffs at Cape Horn and knew I had nowhere I could tuck in. I kept checking behind me for the telltale “black line on the lake” that can arrive in ten minutes and capsize unwary boaters who don’t take shelter, but it didn’t come. I pushed hard the last few kilometres just in case, to the river’s mouth, and all was well. I let the river current push me the last couple of kilometres, returned the kayak, donned my shoes and pack, and set off on foot.
Lake mostly shaded by low morning sun
I took the afternoon’s run along the rail trail at an easy pace. I arrived in Winlaw by mid afternoon, hung out by the creek to cool off, then had an extended lunch/dinner at Sissies. Eventually I barefoot-jogged the 4 km to my B&B for the night. My chronic ankle problem had really flared up on the trail, and I wasn’t feeling too optimistic about the next day’s 54km run, but I had a deep sleep and woke up the next morning feeling a lot better.
Rail trail along the river
The next 25k was also along the rail trail. I stopped after a couple of hours for a snack and was very surprised to pick up an unsecured wifi signal, presumably from a nearby house, though I couldn’t see anything. So I had a fun little chat with Fiona. Thanks, whoever you are!
I met a couple of skittish bears and a tiny fawn and a few toads and snakes as well as making a positive ID on a Lazuli Bunting, thanks to my iBird app. Love that app! It also lets me talk to the birds by playing recordings of their songs. They get very intrigued and usually come closer.
Lots of giant black slugs on the rail trail in the morning
The southern part of that day’s run was amazingly hot. The forecast when I left home had been for cooler weather but the thermometer at Taghum at 3:30 that afternoon was in the 90’s. I was in full sun for most of the last four hours and although I stayed well hydrated I felt worse and worse. I suspect I was pretty close to getting heat stroke, as I ended the day nauseated, headachey and feeling weirdly feverish. Couldn’t stomach the idea of dinner. I couldn’t sleep, either, which was odd because I was definitely running a sleep deficit from the two previous nights.
The next morning I decided to do what I’d been toying with the night before: take the bus to my bike, rather than running the 30 km along the west arm of Kootenay Lake. I was still too nauseated to eat, which meant all I’d eaten in the previous 36 hours was a small bowl of granola, a salad wrap and a couple of Luna bars — despite having run more than a marathon. I knew I couldn’t run until I could eat again. I worked into the morning gradually, drank more electrolyte stuff, and more water, and some coffee, sat around a bit, and then hopped on the bus.
On the ferry. My very old bike is awesome, but is currently in need of some TLC.
I jogged to my bike, feeling a little better, and rode back to the highway. This involved a side trip across the Harrop ferry to my friend’s place, which was a nice diversion. A few kilometres later I stopped and managed to eat a bit of late breakfast.
Near the summit of the pass, looking towards home.
The rest of the day was fine. I felt better for the food. The ride to Kaslo was tougher than I expected, the hills more numerous and steeper. I’d been preparing myself for the big pass between Kaslo and home, but as it turned out the hills before Kaslo were steeper (5-10% grade) than the long slow climb over the pass (3-5% grade mostly, and no problem at all). But it was lots cooler on the third day and occasionally drizzly and made for perfect biking weather. I love that road over the pass anyway, thinking of it as my very own highway since it’s the one that our property is on, and I run on it all winter. There are no utility poles most of the way, so it feels high and lonely and wild. The descent was glorious and I whipped along at up to 50 km/h. Cutting off the morning’s run meant I got home in time to pick Noah up from work, cook dinner, eat (yay!) and get Erin to her gig. Watched an episode of The Newsroom with the younger three kids and went to bed before ten.
I’m still a bit nauseated today but except for that I feel pretty good. A couple of blisters here and there, and that yummy feeling of having done something very long and difficult with my body, but pretty much my usual self.
So yeah. Almost a circle. Not going to beat myself up over a small missing arc.
Because my overnight waypoint was the Nelson house, I was able to ride almost entirely unencumbered. I carried only water, snack, debit card, phone and my little bike toolkit. Knowing that all the comforts of home were already waiting for me in Nelson was almost as good as having a support team travelling with me!
