Day 30

Today is the first day of June! The park warden was really nice and offered to drive us into town to get our bikes sorted, then we could just ride back to the campsite and then head out! That was the plan.... Travis only brought his wheel and realized when we got the the shop that he had no way of getting back to the campground after. So I told him I would get his wheel looked at and then strap his wheel to my rack and then bike back and meet him at the site (and he would go back with the warden to the park now). The bike shop was a nothing shop on the second floor of a tiny strip mall (if you could call it that...). They had NOTHING to fix road bikes. After a while of trying to figure stuff out, they used two of my spokes to fix Travis' bike. They did the best they could to true the wheel, but recommended that he goes to a shop in Jasper or Calgary to get them to do a better job. They couldn't do anything for me (they didn't have a wheel to fit my bike and didn't have any racks). They also didn't have the tools necessary to remove a cassette (for sale. They had the tools for their shop, but there wasn't enough demand for them to stock the tools for sale). But they were very nice and called places in Blue River, Valemount, and Jasper for me to see if anyone had parts for me. Turns out I'll have to wait for Jasper (and I REALLY hope I can put another 300-350km on my bike without it breaking!!!). It took a while before Travis' wheel was done, so I ended up cycling back to the campground around noon. We packed everything up and then made one last stop at the bike shop before hitting the road (there was something wrong with Travis' brakes and he tried but wasn't able to fix it. The guys at the shop were able to fix it up pretty quickly!). We ended up leaving Clearwater around 2:30. We wanted to at least make it to Avola and anything past was bonus. We figured if we made it at least to Avola, we could have a big day tomorrow and make it up toValemount or Tete Jaune Cache (we had an option in each town for a Warm Showers place to crash). We ended up making it just a few kilometers outside of Avola (so we made our goal!). We camped out at the side of the road again on the lake. It was so pretty! There were mountains all around, and the lake was so peaceful! We cycled a total of 80.5km today, and had an early night so we can wake up early tomorrow for our big day! (Tom, the guy from Warm Showers from Valemount told us that tomorrow will be our hardest day from here to Jasper, and seeing how we want to do about 150km on the hardest day, we hope to wake up around 5-6am tomorrow).