day 3: gibsons to seabreeze resort

we rode 56 miles up and down a lot of hills. holy cow it was hard. granted, we barely trained for this bike tour, but our book listed this section as "E" which means "Easy," but it is actually more like "we needed an Elevator" hard. i'm scared of what the medium (M) and difficult (D) days will hold. 

(these sustain us. yes, they are peanut m&m's.)

i'm sitting in my tent, it's 11:15pm and my belly is full. (we had korean spicy noodles and lots of snacks for dinner.) my back is also achier than yesterday; i wonder if my positioning is not ideal. there is a cacophony of frogs providing the background music to our short lived sleepy time before we crash. the moon is huge and i'm grateful to have had a warm shower and running water tonight. last night, we had neither. let me tell you, it's hard to sleep feeling stickiness and not to mention coyotes howling close by! 

anyway, i have two memories i want to share from today. first was when we hauled ass to get to the ferry by 6:30pm. oh my lord. i truly didn't think we'd make it becuase we kept getting hit with hills. do you know how demoralizing it is to go downhill and then suddenly hit a hill - over and over again? but we miraculously made it with 10 minutes to spare. the other memory was while we were biking from saltery bay on a quiet carless road. the sun was heading home for the night while samuel and i cruised along. i looked at samuel and almost cried. i felt so much love towards him, and felt so grateful to be right there with him. (oh, and it is humid here like the jungles of costa rica!! a giant mosquito landed on my arm and that was reason enough to keep haulin even though i was pooped!) 

(can you find our bikes?)

(this was taken after we climbed a monster hill!) 

tomorrow, i'm looking forward to reaching steph's house south of nanaimo and washing some clothes and taking another shower. i am loving the simple pleasures.