Today should be an easy 25 miles down the remainder of the Elk River road  (let’s play word association I say road you think potholed dirt track).

A nice lazy start today giving everything chance to dry off after last night’s thunderstorm. Goodbyes were said to the fishermen and we were off. The cycling was straight forward, the surface determining the rate of progress.

Elk River road

Again the temperature soared without a cloud in the sky and coated with factor 50 sunblock, anti insect cream and bite relief cream Janet resembled Mr Whippy.

There was no pushing today in fact there was a distinct lack of steepness.

Below is a picture of the unluckiest frog in the world.

It was run over trying to cross the 35 mile long dirt track where around 10 vehicles a day travel along. For all you maths students what is the probability of the frog being squashed?
As we followed the river the first sign of the mining heritage Elkford has came into view a vast open cast coal mine, massive amounts of minerals were extracted and continue to be extracted from here, around 10000 acres (for those of you who cannot visualise this 10000 acres is half of 20000 acres) with another 40000 acres of reserves.

Eventually the track gave way to tarmac and we entered Elkford, almost as fast we were setting up our tent in Elkford Municipal Campground, with drinking water and real toilets and all sorts of new fangled inventions like showers and even WiFi  (you may notice the several updates today) taken from my hand written notes in my mighty fine and impressive Martin’s important notes on his bike and cycling expeditions (thank you Helen).

We decided to forgo dried pasta again and purchased a pizza, feeling hungry we ordered a medium each, the waitress looked at us strangely “are you sure only me and my husband share one of those between us” we had fallen into the classic forgetting everything is bigger in Canada trap, we downsized to a small and failed to finish even these (they were very nice though).
As it is so nice here we are going to have a day off tomorrow and stop here another day. Did we mention the fantastic supermarket here? So we will just sit back and enjoy Elkford.