Canada Day 1 Calgary-Ghost Lake

Nansen and I are on the road again. That means in this case another bike holiday. This time I’m planning to cycle from Calgary to Vancouver, through Banff and Jasper National Park, which should be around 1300 kilometres in total and take me around two weeks.

I arrived in Calgary on Friday and spent only one day there. My plan landed at 1:30. At the airport, I had planned to assemble my bike, pack everything in my bike bags and send the cardboard box with the things I didn’t need on my trip to Vancouver, so that I can use the same box on my return flight.

Coming out from the baggage hall, I was greeted by some very friendly older gentlemen with cowboy hats who are there volunteering to help the tourists. They told me where I could find the UPS store which I had found on Google. So I went there and just made sure that they could send the box at all (because it’s huge). And then I started unpacking the box and reassembling my bike. All in all, that took me a bit more than one hour, which means everything went very smoothly. Then I went back to the UPS guy and paid for the transport, which was finally much more than he had estimated before, but still OK given that I won’t have the stress to find a new box in Vancouver during the weekend I’m planning to stay there.

From the airport, I took a bus to the city centre – with my bike on a rack in front of the bus. I was very lucky with the place where I stayed, Hotel Arts, which was affordable, yet very fancy. A friend of a friend joined me for dinner. I was recommended to take Poutine, a Canadian specialty, but played safe with fish & chips in the end. The plan was originally to go out for some beers, but at ten o’clock (six in the morning Norwegian time), my lights went out and I returned to my hotel.

The next morning I had to return the Mountain Equipment Coop store to get my bear defence spray which I didn’t get the night before because I hadn’t known that I needed an ID. (Mr. Nansen was very upset that I got the spray.)

After packing all my stuff at the hotel, I finally left for my first bike day. In order to avoid the downtown traffic, I took a tram to the Northwest suburbs. I started cycling at eleven and had planned to go to Ghost Lake initially. However, I considered now to go all the way to Banff on my first day after all in order to have one more buffer day in case of bad weather or other unforeseen circumstances. The trip to Banff would have been 130 kilometres though which would have been very hard on the first day, especially given the fact that I have hardly cycled this spring and my longest trip so far this season was 50 kilometres. In addition, it turned out that I had very strong headwinds. The area west of Calgary is still a great plain where the west wind isn’t stopped by anything. So I was struggling hard today and often couldn’t go faster than 10 km/h in flat areas. So Banff wasn’t an option finally, and I went to Ghost Lake only (51 km), which was tough enough.

Arriving there, I passed by a camping site which I thought was not the one I wanted to stay at. So I continued, but unfortunately, there came never another one. So I was a bit uncertain what to do because I didn’t want to go back, and there wasn’t any other campsite or other accommodation anywhere near by. So I finally just set up my tent at a parking space near the highway around five kilometres beyond Ghost Lake.

The wind seems to get less now in the evening, so I hope for better conditions during my ride to Banff tomorrow, which will include some climbing. It’s 7:30 now and I’m very tired already. So I’ll probably sleep early and get up early in the morning.

Done with the bike assembling

Selfie in the morning

My first campsite (wait til you hear about the coyotes in the next blog post)