Day 13: 92 km-Rogers Pass! 1331 metres...

Woke up bright and early like usual but feeling substantially soggier then normal due to a giant rainstorm during the night. Cold and damp we got dressed and packed up eager to hit the road and get the legs pumping and blood flowing in order to warm up! We headed up up up towards Roger's pass. We had camped about 7km before the pass so that meant about 7km of uphill before us. Luckily the grade wasn't too bad and we had nice wide shoulders to pedal on. Loving the granny gear these days, slowly but steadily we went up the mountain. The morning was clear and we had lots of opportunities for great pictures of the mountains!

Heading down from the pass was a fast and easy ride except for the tunnels, a cyclists worst night mare! The first tunnel we encountered had no lights and was completely dark inside a.k.a TERRIFYING! Blindly pedaling through the tunnel and hoping for no potholes or other unforseen obstacles in our path was one of the scarier moments of the day. We all made it through or around in the case of Mary, Jon and Emma. I was feeling really good that morning and was keeping a fairly fast pace so I lost sight of the rest of the group after a while, I decided to stop and wait for them to catch up but after waiting for about 15 minutes and still no sign I continued on to the meet point with the car. I thought it was odd that they hadn't arrived but wasn't particularly concerned. A couple km later I found the support vehicle on the side of the road and JD and I proceeded to wait another 45 minutes for the rest of the group. By this point we were a little concerned and JD was about to hop on her bike and look for everyone when another cyclist came into view. We spoke with him and found out that Nod and Laurie were waiting at the bottome of the hill and he had passed the other 3 at the tunnels of which they were going around as opposed to through. What a relief to hear everyone was ok and they were just slow because bushwacking around the tunnels is substantially slower then buzzing through them!

After a lunch we still had 35km to go and I was back in the zone pedalling along to the time of my music! Bridges were the next obstacle we had to overcome, a race between us and the semis to get over the bridges, constantly looking over our shoulder to see whether we or not we were about to be caught! Bridges are a constant fear on this trip because you always lose your shoulder and have to ride in the lane with vehicles and depending on how patient they are they might try to pass us really close next to us!

Getting into Golden felt good, had a nice stretch on the grass while waiting for everyone else to trickle into town. We all rode through town together towards the church where we were making dinner. After a delicious Thai curry we were picked up by our billets for a good night's sleep in a real bed. Nod and I got to stay with a wonderful couple who live on the outskirts of town and have been there for the past 50 years so they had some great stories to tell us about what things used to be like when they were raising their children, as well as great stories about bears in their yard! We each had our own bedrooms that night and again big beds to ourselves, what a luxury! A much needed sleep followed shortly!