I’d meant to do this for a while, but just not gotten around to it – the ride home from work. Theoretically I should be riding there as well, but it’s a 42km (26mi) ride including a nice 7km hill climb tacked on the end. So instead I took the easy way out, and ferried my bike into work this morning in one of the work trucks.
The coast down hill I was expecting for the first 7km turned out to include two of the three biggest hill climbs of the whole ride – that’s what you get for making assumptions about a road you’ve never biked before. But from then on it was off the road and onto trails – soggy horse trails at first, then the wide packed hiking/trail-riding trails out towards the Cave and Basin at Banff. Through the back ways of Banff, past the golf course, and onto the single trail on the east side of Mount Rundle. At which point I started wishing I had a dualie instead of the trusty hardtail, as the trail had a consistent mix of pine tree roots and rocks. I rode along dreaming of the smooth trails of the Gravity 12 hour near Myrtleford back in Australia – ahhh, the land of no pine trees, where all single trail is perfectly smooth (at least in my daydreams).
So I rode along doing my best to cushion the bumps, and yelling sporadically to keep the bears away. I have a bruised tailbone now.