8/11: Elko, Fernie, Sparwood

Woke up pretty tired in my bones. Well, it's obviously my muscles, but the figure of speech rings true. We always feel fresher and want to push more on the road. But in the mornings, there's more concern that we can't keep this pace up. The delay with the baggage means we lost our two buffer days, one of which we'd like to make up on the road. 

Average 48mi over the next 7 days without a rest day or 57mi with a rest day. Rest day seems totally viable, but we need to pick the right place for maximal downtime enjoyment. 

I have a chocolaty pocket. I didn't finish eating a bar on the road and put it in my jacket and promptly forgot about it. Then all my stuff -- phone, wallet, Kindle -- all got chocolate on them. How? Eventually I solved their riddle, but now I'm afraid to of getting other things chocolaty if I put them in that pocket. 

We got lunch at Fernie and then headed out of town only to see a huge road construction project going on. They just let us go through in our direction before switching to let the other side through. Even so, traffic was backed up for 6mi or so, with no traffic coming behind us until maybe 50min later. It was nice to have the highway to ourselves. 

Saw the world's largest truck:

Was pretty excited to run into that. 

Then we rode into our camp, which was right next to this spit of land that was almost an island from the isthmus of the road:

Seeing that island and deciding to explore it brought out a real sense of childlike adventure. 

Matt took a brisk bath in the lake water. I topped off my water bottles there and had Matt run the water purification chemicals on that water. So far so good.