Bike Delay

I imagine that his post will be rather swift with scant details of current goings on in Cochrane. However, to surmise;

Mark and Lucy arrived on Wednesday night, although we'd been waiting for them to appear from behind the "customs wall" for an hour before a big security fellow came up to me and, in a serious tone, asked if my name was Simon (I fought off the flashbacks and angst) to which my response was obviously affirmative. He told me and Brina that Mark and Lucy were here but minus a bag - bugger. It was the bike bag...

After two days of hunting for the bike, it has finally rocked up in Calgary, so we have picked it up and are now due to depart on the road trip. We're heading off to Glacier in Montana this afternoon, and we'll ride the "Going to the Sun" road tomorrow. Then off to Yellowstone to see Yogi, into Colorado after a few days - then goodness knows where we'll end up after that...

We've already had a stint up into Banff and the bro and sis in law went out searching for their old haunts - all well and good as Lucy bumped into the manager she worked for at Wild Bills years ago... although Mark's obsession of nostalgia was to drag us around the Banff Springs Hotel searching for the electrical sockets where he used to plug and power up his vaccuum whilst cleaning up on the night shift (good times eh?).

We'd milled around the airport a bit yesterday trying to track down the bag - as we needed face to face contact seeing as though the Air Canada helpline for baggage is based in India and the assistants (loose use of the term) merely read from a pre printed script and did bugger all (no berating of the Indians, just Air Canada). A picnic in Bragg Creek eased the evening away (scorching hot... almost too hot for mozzies - almost), and then we ended up driving to the airport at 10.30pm to collect the bike - it's amazing how the US homeland security hassle all entrants into the country with finger prints, anal probes, labradors and beagles sniffing at your crotch for scent of TNT and make you take your shoes off when walking through the metal detectors (although I think that's because they like to keep the carpet clean in US customs. Yet they are able to loose a bike bag which is so big a family of terrorists could hide in it, nobody could trace it in San Fransico and then lo and behold it is loaded upon a plane two days later - how does that work???

The paper work about the lost bike stated it was a giant bike (which it is) but this raied eyebrows with the Air Canada officials as they were looking for the giant who rode it (it's not really THAT big we had to explain).

Anyway, this has turned out a little longer than expected, but we're off for two weeks, so a big old update will be posted when we get back - with plenty of piccies and nodoubt some Tom Foolery adventures,

Enjoy the summer,

Happy Hols'

S&S.

p.s. Some people just haven't quite got over the jet lag yet though.