Monday – Hope, British Columbia
On the road again 🙂
Well, I woke up refreshed, the sun was out and I was ready for a ride again 🙂 My wog was just about gone and if I was not actually 100% I was 300% better than yesterday! I looked at my map book again, but at this stage I could not get my head around all the places I wanted to be and which way to go, so I will leave it to chance 🙂 As you can see, the location of the beginning of my cure is just across the parking lot, as usual 😆
So, fuelled and ready to go I decided to go to Kamloops first, the road was great and although the smoke haze was there, it was good to be amongst the twisties again 🙂
Once in Kamloops, I had no idea where to go to find a Suzuki shop, but I spotted an Office supplier shop and bought a fix for my SPOT device, it had kept ripping the velcro apart and so kept falling off, fixed it now though and a bag of them cost me $1 🙂
Next stop was a tool shop, I wanted to open the TomTom to find out how the water was getting in and to see if I could find a dry joint or something, or any corrosion. It is secured with Torx screws, so the first shop was an auto type place but the smallest they had was a 10mm, I needed smaller. They directed me to another tool supplier and I ended up buying a small multi pack of tips and a single driver with another tip as they had used two different sizes. This is a terrible photo as I took it in the dark, but the handle thing and the little bit next to it is all I needed for the job, the rest of the orange pack was extra, I may ditch it later, maybe!
Job sorted, I then located a Suzuki shop, closed, and had a burger for lunch while studying my map book.
Now I had a plan, sort of, I would head down to Hope, but not on the highway, I would be chasing the back roads, or highway 5A. That worked for a little while, then the road turned dirty 🙂
I was not expecting that, but according to my GPS it was only 10kms to the next turning, so I left the tyres up, but I did stop to remove my thermal gear, it was warming up real nice.
I was also listening to some new music, well new to me called Nightwish, a metal band from Finland that has an opera singer as lead, very nice, grab a song called Sleeping Sun, you will be surprised, it made the whole day enjoyable and everything on the bike was working fine!!! The road was soon back to paved and it generally followed a valley past a series of lakes and hay meadows and farms, very country 🙂
The hills were dry as a bone and reminded me of home a bit, but with all the lakes, they had a heap of irrigation happening, most of it seemed to be hay making.
Nothing special about this picture, except I nearly got a photo of a dragonfly doing a 100kmh 🙂
Twisties, twisties and more twisties, this is what I missed, I did not even mind the occasional logging truck, as it gave me something to do 🙂
And it did not stop there, the whole afternoon was like this, brilliant, not a bad recovery day. Up through the mountain ranges and it started to get a bit cool, this is where I found out my wog was not gone totally because once I got up over the 4000ft mark it became a tad difficult to equalise my sinuses. But it warmed up on the other side where I was actually passed by someone, they must have been hoiking it, cos I was no slouch 🙂
I got into Hope just after 5pm and checked the Info centre for a camp site with Wifi, there was only one choice, a few kms out of town, but it also had a laundry and that was a bonus indeed.
Once I had my tent up and cooked a feed of noodles, I opened the TomTom and had a peek inside, it was full of crap, how could that be, it is supposed to be weather proof!!
I cleaned off everything as best as I could with my toothbrush, and then left it apart for a while as I could still see moisture in some areas. Then it was time for a shower, laundry and check email etc, before having a quiet night back at the tent site listening to music and reading, it had started to cool off, hopefully I made the right decision about camping, I guess I will find out tomorrow 🙂
Day 282 miles and 454 km
Trip – 32,851 miles and 52,869 km
Cheers
TravellingStrom
TravellingStrom 