Revenge of the flatlands

May 16 Stop location: Carbon

lat 51.48586N
lon 113.15094W
alt 768
138km
5:09
26.8km/h

This was a pretty fun ride, long, but we had a pretty nice tailwind for a decent chunk of it which made things go very smoothly.

After the previous post making the smart assed comment about flatlands, Alberta reared up and proceeded to prove me wrong. Turns out the praries, at least the first parts of them that we ride through are seriously rolling. In the first 35km, we had at least 3 climbs of more than 2km and a couple of 3km ones. Nothing too brutal, but a couple coming out of little valleys were pretty steep. Wonderful riding roads though, the quality of the pavement was good and the nicely rolling roads kept things interesting.

May 17 Stop location: Drumheller

lat 51.46747N
lon 112.71568W
alt 716m
39km
1:29
25.8km/h

The Tyrrell Museum is awesome. Unless you are of the young earth variety, I highly recommend hitting it if you're ever in Calgary and need an interesting day trip. Drumheller itself is kind of weird, but the museum has some very, very cool exhibits. The ride was short, Tanya put in extra miles, I was lazy and decided to eat instead.

Note in the pictures for today the warning about swimming in the 'pond' in front of the museum. Sign of the trip perhaps.

May 18 Stop location: Richdale (Forgot to get the coords when there, we parked in Hanna, so I'll get them tomorrow and update then)

102km
5:10
19.65km/h

Holy Pain Batman. So much for the prairies being easier.

The route today went north, then east. We spent the entire time pointing into a strong NE wind. The end result was essentially 5 hours of simulated climbing. Mentally an incredibly tough day to say the least for a number of reasons. At least in the hills when you go up a huge climb, you get to come down the other side, the wind was relentless and downhills we were hitting the insane speeds of 25-27km/h. Those were the steep hills. Several of the more gentle downs were taken at 22km/h or less.

Supposedly we can look forward to more of the same tomorrow, though by early afternoon, we're supposed to get a S wind, which just means it's a crosswind, not a direct headwind.

70 hours 22 minutes of riding time for a total of 1609km at an average speed of 22.8km/h.