Riley: Adventure Dog

My original plan for this past weekend was to head to Banff and do some hiking with my friend Angela, but she got a concussion playing soccer last week and was feeling a bit too woozy to go. Instead I ended up heading to Jasper on Sunday with Lindsay and Dan, and their friend Robbie for some mountain biking. We had pretty decent weather, with just a bit of rain partway through the ride, and enjoyed riding along the Athabasca River. The trail was mostly through forests (nice pine needle sections!) and meadows with the occasional technical rocky section here and there. It was Riley's first real mountain adventure, as well as her first mountain biking trip, and she was great! She was able to keep up just fine, in fact was faster than me on my bike sometimes! I was also happy to see that even though there were 4 of us biking, and we would get a bit spread out sometimes, she always stuck closest to me, and would wait for me if I stopped even if everyone else had started biking again. Her training may not be totally perfect but at least she's loyal!
I don't have any pictures to go with this post, since they were taken on a (gasp!) disposable camera with REAL film...but I'll put them up if I ever get around to taking the camera in to get developed.

I was doing a bit of weeding in my garden the other day and noticed that the tops of my beets were sticking out of the soil, so I decided to pull one up and see how big they are getting. They aren't huge, I think I'll let the rest of them grow for another week or two, but I just cooked this little one up for dinner. Delicious!

veggie update

I got back to Edmonton after being away for 10 days and found that my garden is going crazy! As you can see the box is quite full. The lettuce (left front) is definitely ready to harvest. There are snap peas almost ready to eat too!
And I have one little red tomato inside...and several more green ones.

ALASKA!

I spent the last 10 days on my annual summer trip to Anchorage. The main focus of the trip was riding the 200 mile Fireweed road bike race, but I had lots of fun in the week leading up to it too! I stayed with my friends Pam and Carl and their 16 month old Walker which was quite entertaining. Walker can't actually walk yet (I blame his name) but has an incredible vocabulary and for the most part is very energetic and happy. I spent a lot of time just hanging out at the house with him. I was also lucky enough to overlap the first few days of my trip with the last few days of my friend Charis' visit home. She and her husband live in Norway and I hadn't seen her in more than a year. She is one of my best friends and I miss hiking and running and skiing with her so it was really fun to get out and hike Flattop with her.

My aunt was visiting at the same time as me, and she and my mom and I went on a boat tour of Kenai Fjords last Monday and then on Tuesday went kayaking in Blackstone Bay, in Prince William Sound. We had a great time on the boat tour. I've been on that trip several times with other visitors and have never seen as many whales. We probably saw 20 humpbacks. It was spectacular.

We took most of our kayaking pictures on disposable cameras, but I used my zoom on my digital to get a good picture of these little guys. They were playing like crazy as we kayaked up to them and as we got closer they just popped up and looked at us.
It was great to get out of Anchorage and do some very "Alaskan" stuff while I was home!

Pam and I decided after doing the 200 mile relay (each riding 100 miles) for the past two years that we wanted to actually ride together, and this year signed up for the 200 solo in the Fireweed. I didn't feel like my training had gone as well as I would have liked, and we were both very nervous the morning of the race, but we got on our bikes and rode off....and we made it! I definitely had a point just after 110 miles where I started to bonk, and didn't know if I was going to make it or not, but I drafted off of Pam for a while and stocked up on food and got through it. We struggled into a horrible headwind up and over Thompson Pass, and even after that thought that the worst part of the race was the last 10 miles, which felt like they were going to go on forever! We finished in just over 14 hours, and tied for 4th place, with 7 women in the race. Check here for some good pictures of the scenery going over Thompson Pass. Despite the headwind it was the sunniest we've ever had it for the race.

This is a picture of Pam putting dried mango under her shorts to eat while riding. This provided much hilarity later in the race when we were a bit loopy anyways and the mangos kept sticking to her legs. And here we are on the ferry from Valdez to Whittier on Sunday...happy to be done and still standing!

As promised, here is the picture from Hillside Estate Winery in Penticton!

Penticton, BC

July 1 was a holiday in Canada (Canada Day!) and my boss told me not to come to work on Monday so Stacy and I headed to Penticton, in southern BC with her boyfriend Jaime and his roommate John. We ended up renting a house in the village of Naramata, just northeast of Penticton and site of many of the South Okanagan wineries. Since we drove down Saturday, Sunday was our first real day of doing anything. Stacy and I took off on our road bikes and the boys went mountain biking. I originally wanted to ride the Ironman course, but the forecast for the whole weekend was 40 degrees C (100F) and Stacy didn't feel like she was trained up for that distance so we modified the plan a bit. To avoid the heat I started riding at 5:30am and rode 40 miles to Keremeos. Stacy drove out there with two of her friends who live in Penticton and from there we rode another 30 miles. I really had wanted to ride at least 100 miles, but even before I got to Keremeos the heat and the hills started to get to me. After the girls met up with me I started to fade pretty fast and it was only our 2 stops to jump in a river, fully in our bike clothes, that kept me going. We finally made it back to the house around 2:30 (needless to say I rode back with them in the car) and everyone crashed until dinner. We had a lovely dinner that evening at the Hillside Estate winery. We were surprised (and a bit flattered!!) when they asked us if we would be willing to model during dinner for a professional photographer who was taking pictures for their new website! Dinner was great and we had a lot of fun =)
Monday was a bit more relaxed. Everyone else slept in while I got in a quick morning bike ride, followed by a dip in the lake. We spend a lot of the day at a great coffee shop in Naramata doing the crossword and then headed to the beach for a while. We hit up three wineries later in the day to do some tastings and stock up on some wines, and then headed back to our house for a BBQ dinner. Tuesday we had to unfortunately head back to Edmonton. I worked all of one day yesterday, and now I'm sitting in the Seattle airport on my way to Anchorage!


I took this picture at 5:30 in the morning on my bike ride, looking out over the vineyards and Lake Okanagan


The girls after our first dip in the river!


Our view of the sunset across Lake Okanagan at dinner at Hillside Estate


The smoked salmon appetizer at Hillside Estate!


Enjoying wine with my dinner =)


Sculpture and vineyards outside Red Rooster Winery

The photographer from our dinner at Hillside Estate said he would email some photos, so when I get those I'll put them up.