Post Race Adventures

After the race, I grabbed a couple pieces of pizza and went to my family who was waiting. They had already grabbed all of my gear. I was pretty pumped so we said goodbye and Ben and I just headed back to our hotel.Ben, however, decided to stop at Burger King first, I dont think we've eaten fast food in the 6 years we've been together! He got a burger, french fries, onion rings, and chicken fingers. We went back to the hotel and while Ben ate I had an epsom salt bath and passed out. We woke up the next morning moving pretty slowly, our legs were pretty sore. We met my dad and switched our tri stuff with our camping stuff, and then we decieded to go down to the Ironman grounds. We checked out the overpriced finisher apparael, grabbed our special needs bags, and had the free breakfast. We headed back to our hotel to check out and figure out where we were going to go. We were planning on camping around couer d'alene for the week, but it had started to rain, so we started googling places. According to the weather network if we drove south we would hit sun. So we drove, and drove, and 5 hours later we arrived in McCall Idaho, a super cute lake town... that was supposed to look like this:

but instead we ended up like this:


So we quickly set up our tent and went in to town in search of beer and pizza. Which we found at a cool pizza place where we got the flamethrower pizza which was a combination of elk sausage, jalapenos, and crasins... weird combo but AMAZING. We went back to the tent and slept hoping that the weather network hadn't steered us wrong and it would clear up the next day.
Nope, it rained... poured in fact. We set up tarps and hung out by the campfire praying for it to clear up. By 8 pm, our camp site had pretty large puddles all around, and the inside of the tent was damp. SO we made the decision to sleep in the car, with Rudy. It was a little squishy but at least it was dry. We made a deal that if we woke up on Wednesday and it was raining then we would head to Fernie. Wednesday morning came and guess what, we woke up to pouring rain!! We packed everything up soaking wet, and started the LOOONG drive to fernie.. 9 hours. We would have been better off to have just stayed and camped in Coeur D'alene since it was raining there to but at least we would have been closer to home.

We had made it 6 hours when we stopped at a walmart in Sandpoint to load up on alcohol before we crossed the border only to come back to a flat tire. UGH! nothing was going right! It was totally ruined, but we scored a used tire for 40 bucks to get us home. We got to fernie around 8 pm that night. Where we were greeted with Nancy, Bill, beer, food, a shower and a nice warm and dry bed. Ahh bliss!

We stayed in fernie until Saturday. The weather was beautiful and it's always nice to visit with my in-laws. Our legs were feeling better so we climbed castle moutain on thursday.

Friday and saturday we did alot of walking, went to sureveyor lake near kokanoosa, napped, drank some beer and just enjoyed being off. Then it was back to calgary to get ready to return to reality.