So, the bike fairy finally came, and I have myself a Giant Anthem X 29er 3 now.
So far it hasn’t been on anything except for snow – including a ride down the main street at the end of the snow-on-the-street festivities. So it’s still shiny and new.
I’m waiting for the snow on the trails to melt now. Impatiently.
I’m still dreaming of a new mountain-bike, and have been dragging the Moosling through all the local bike stores to look at the 2011 bikes that are arriving. The Giant Anthem W? The Giant Anthem 29er? A Santa Cruz Juliana?
With all the snow and cold weather recently, the trails are still thoroughly covered though, so the pending visit of the Bike Fairy is not yet urgent.
I think I was planning to do this last year, but was completely overwhelmed by the task of choosing one photo per country, let alone one photo per month. This year, that’s not such a problem. We rarely strayed from the Bow Valley, so all adventures were pretty local, although some were admittedly quite life-changing. A few days before the year began, I found out I was pregnant. And so that provided the frame for my year to unravel in (and decided us on staying in Canada for the rest of 2010 at least).
January: I started working for a heli-skiing company in mid-December, after arriving back to Canada from the epic Japan-Europe bike trip. When the opportunity for a free four day heli-skiing trip came up through work, I thought I’d better jump at it (as in a few months time I might be getting a bit too pregnant). The rest of the month was largely spent being exhausted and nauseous, thanks to the pregnancy hormones kicking in. I did squeeze in one day of ice climbing though, seconding up a 200 metre long WI4 – lots of fun, very tiring. There were also family friends visiting, who we went out adventuring with a little (and managed to dislocate Brendan’s shoulder on his first backcountry skiing experience – although we got it back in, and he came back to Canada to live for the Winter, so it can’t have put him off too much)
February: The first few days of the month I was still away heli-skiing, then returned to Canmore, absolutely exhausted (although sated on much tasty food). I did my first hike up Ha Ling Peak for the year, as the unseasonably warm Winter continued. An ultrasound in Calgary proved that there was only one wee beastie growing inside me, to my considerable relief. The Winter Olympics were on in Vancouver, and I spent my 30th birthday watching the Olympics and eating chocolate fondue and pie (but not together) at a friends place. Otherwise I spent a lot of time being incredibly nauseous, and having a lot less energy than usual (although I still got out skiing a few times). Sleep was king.
March: My nausea was thankfully fading by now (except for mornings, when ginger ale was my saviour), and I was starting to get my energy back, so I started getting out doing things a little more often, which felt great. The beginnings of movements were starting inside my tummy, and I got some hiking and biking done. I acquired a full body harness as well, and started a routine of going to the climbing gym every couple of weeks to do some easy climbing.
April: I did a lot more hiking this month, as the “Winter” seemed to have disappeared altogether now – although I still got in a few days of skiing. We started house hunting, looking to move to somewhere a little larger, hopefully downtown. There were obvious rollings around going on inside my stomach – by the end of the month I was more than five months pregnant, and some days it felt like I had a herd of elephants loose inside my tummy.
May: Alex and I did our last ski tour together for the year, to Egypt Lake (we got the hut to ourselves, and it’s fantastic). We started getting cyclists trickling in to stay with us via the warmshowers.com website. And we got a Magic Bullet blender, and the obsession with making smoothies began – thankfully my appetite had finally returned to normal, and the hypersensitive sense of smell had vanished. Mid-month we moved to our new house – a 2-bedroom four-plex that’s right downtown. Otherwise the month was filled with hikes, bike rides, yoga, and kicks in the stomach.
June: Early in the month there was an alarming pie explosion incident. It was followed by lots of hiking up the neighbourhood mountains, and I noticed my available oxygen was gradually decreasing over the month. Mid-month there was an attack of visa stress as our current work permits were due to expire, yet the application for new ones wasn’t going as smoothly as anticipated. We also had a tame ferret break into our house via the tumble dryer ducting – sadly we found his owners and returned him the following afternoon.
July: We did a three day hike from Sunshine Village to Mount Assiniboine and out via Mount Shark, while I was 34 weeks pregnant. Getting in and out of the tent was challenging, and my feet were swollen and enormous by the end of it, but it was fantastic anyway. My oxygen started returning as the baby started settling head down. Despite that I was still finding it harder to get out hiking, as I was moving so much more slowly, and all the warm weather was making my feet puffy and swollen. At the end of the month I was a volunteer for the work team doing the 24 Hours of Adrenaline (a mountain bike enduro event), which Alex competed in – dislocating his shoulder half-way through the event when we ducked off for a swim in the lake to cool down. I biked the Legacy Trail between Banff and Canmore for the first time and was kicking myself for not doing it earlier.
August: At the start of the month I was 37 weeks pregnant and staying at the Bugaboos Lodge. Thankfully the long long very bumpy road in to the lodge didn’t set off labour. I did my last hike up Ha Ling Peak, and finished up at work. By August it was almost impossible to get any sleep overnight, everything was uncomfortable, and rolling over in bed was an epic mission that had to be contemplated for minutes before commencing. Walking around was increasingly uncomfortable as my pelvis hurt so much, but I found cycling was really comfortable, with my pregnant stomach hanging hammock-like, and barely any weight on my poor feet. Some friends stayed for a few days, visiting from Australia, then I spent my last week of pregnancy being domestic. And then on the 21st my waters broke just before midday. 40 hours later, the Moosling had arrived. The rest of the month disappeared in a blur of getting to know him, and learning how to look after him.
September: We took the Moosling to see his first pipe and drums bands at the Canmore Highland Games as I gradually regained the ability to walk more than a hundred metres. Mum came to visit for most of the month, and spent lots of time cooking and looking after us. By the end of the month I was feeling recovered enough to join in on the family hike up Ha Ling Peak (my tenth summit of the peak for the year, and Finn’s first summit on the outside).
October: This was the month of adapting to life with the Moosling, with Alex back at work and without my Mum to help out. Friends visited, we had a big Thanksgiving dinner, and I started hiking and bouldering again, and doing yoga. We started getting out and about with Finn in his Chariot. And someone bought a copy of the boardgame Settlers of Catan, which we started playing several times a week.
November: Early in the month the Moosling and I did a flying day trip to Vancouver to get his Australian passport sorted. Then there was enough snow around to start skiing at the Nordic Centre, testing out the Chariot in ski mode, and we got a family day out at Sunshine. I kept bouldering, and for some reason I did nanowrimo and got a short novel written.
December: After a few days of skiing early in the month, we flew to Australia. There we spent a couple of weeks in Melbourne, going to a wedding and doing a whirlwind visit of friends and family. Christmas and New Years were then spent up at the farm (while Alex went back to Canada to work… and ski).
In lieu of a proper book review, I’ll just give you some quotes from the book The Third Policeman. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting from a book written in 1939 and set in rural Ireland. It’s just a little fantastical, and I can now understand why it wasn’t published until 1967. As one reviewer said – you’ll never look at bicycles the same way again.
“Tell me,” he continued, “would it be true that you are an itinerant dentist and that you came on a tricycle?”
“It would not,” I replied.
“On a patent tandem?”
“No.”
“Dentists are an unpredictable coterie of people,” he said. “Do you tell me it was a velocipede or a penny-farthing?”
“Why should anyone steal a watch when they can steal a bicycle?”
“The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.”
“…You do not mean to say that these bicycles eat food?”
“They were never seen doing it, nobody ever caught them with a mouthful of steak. All I know is that the food disappears.”
I’ve been thinking that a new mountain bike would be nice. My old hardtail was always a little too large for me. And maybe, just maybe, I should try out this crazy dual-suspension thing that all the kids have been talking about.
But it seems an awful lot of the women’s specific cross-country style MTBs out there at the moment don’t really appeal to me though – far too many horrible paint jobs and ugly frames (also I’m anti-white-bits-on-bikes, we all know they just end up brown). These three are all pretty acceptable though – anyone have any other recommendations?
Now I’m just going to sit here waiting for the mountain bike fairy to come and visit (he’s a huge guy with tattooed calves, a full face helmet, and a big tutu with grease stains on it, you’d know him if you saw him).