*If you are easily offended, stop reading now. You have been warned!
Just been riding through seemingly endless rain for the last couple of weeks. Every day rain but we forge on southwards beyond the Alcan and into the western part of Alberta.
What a sight! A hotdog van with a shelter out in the middle of nowhere between Grande Prairie and Grande Cache was a very welcome site during yet another rain storm. Lovely.
Happy that the steam hid the crime of this particular meal in the photo. Reconstituted potato, fish stuff and devon sausage bits. Utter merde!
LNG and pipelines are touchy subjects up here. However, you just have to admire the sheer exuberance (and rendering) of the ‘bird’.
Should have dropped in for some bargains. Silver-linings?
Here at Buff3ysbicycling blog we are great lovers of road signs. That is, unless they are like the huge stupid sign outside Grande Cache in Alberta that states it is 1km to town, when it is actually 5.6km of 7%-10% gradient rise! Just how does anyone put one of those things up?! Love Canadians and Canadia of course, but the kilometre signage here is just all over the place.
I particularly liked the Trudeau bird sign (above). We are sure that Mr Trudeau is a very nice man but really don’t care. The joyous expression of abuse is to be applauded.
Such sentiments are increasingly rare in Australia, which is a matter of some regret. An Australian considering such a sign would pause and fall into a fit of hand-wringing (or out-source their political bravado to ‘egg-boy’). Not sure how it happened but over the last twenty or thirty years the laid back approach that prompted us to just do things, regardless of how stupid and futile, and by which we seemed to define ourselves, is now just not what it was. It has been replaced by endless by-laws, fear of consequence and collection of parking, speeding fines and council notices to remove what-ever-the-hell weed. It is more than mere modernisation making things this way. When you have visiting Europeans bemoaning the fact that Australia has too many rules, you know there is a problem. It’s almost like in response to some subliminal message embedded in a New Price is Right TV telecast, the population of Australia fronted up to local post offices where an officer reached into the chest cavities and extracted the ‘screw-it’ genes and mojo glands from each unsuspecting fop with a staple remover. All then settled into an era of disconcerting and debilitating dread of what might happen; in place of the previous ‘screw-it’ ethos an insidious reticence.
Stan, a crusty old drunk propping up the bar at a lodge way back up the road in Yukon, on learning that I was from Australia, had no hesitation in making his assessment, “Australians are pussies!”. Really? “We should be brothers – Australians and Canadians – but when I went there and they were all pussies”. Confronting assessment, I’ll grant you. Taken aback, the only retort I could muster was, “All the hardcore Aussies are here in Canada right now”, which did the trick. But he is right. Australia used to be the land of ‘No Worries’ but has now somehow morphed into the land of, ‘I’m sufficiently concerned as to the possible adverse consequences of your proposal that I will now don my safety high-vis vest and consult the risk reduction manual prior to making an assessment as to whether any worry is justified’.
Buff3ysbicyclingblog will start the fight back right here! In celebration of and homage to the effort of the artist who created such a lovely ‘bird’ for Mr. Trudeau, we echo the sentiment and lustily proclaim for no readily apparent reason: Fuck you Trudeau!! Up yours you bastard!!
Just to be even-handed, we also send a hearty ‘Fuck you!’ to his political opponents (whoever the hell they are).
To the drivers of the massive RVs who don’t cross to the other side of the road when passing hard-core adventure cyclists: SCREW YOU!! (I actually meant that one)
To the people who don’t like Buff3ysbicyclingblog: BITE ME!!
To the people who made the road sign ‘Grande Cache 1km‘ and put it 5.6km from Grande Cache: YOU ARE DICKHEADS!!
Feel better for that. We now waft down into the national parks of Jasper and Banff and join the mobs of well-heeled designer trekkers who are heading out on North-face sponsored walks along with their hotel associates holding their carefully calibrated trail-mix combo bars. On-on!
Dawson Creek – Grande Prairie 131km
Grande Prairie to Kakwa River 101km
Kakwa River to Grande Cache 95km
Grande Cache to Hinton 143km
Hinton to Jasper 75km
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