After a day of rest and relaxation with Jeremy’s Mom in Invermere (thank you again Judy for such a good visit and all those home-cooked meals!), we were ready to hit the road again.  Mother Nature must have confused the first day of Fall with the first day of winter, though.  There was frost on our bikes this morning as we were loading them up.

We definitely had our coldest ride ever after we said goodbye to Jeremy’s Mom and headed to Fernie, British Columbia.  The thermometer on our bikes said 2 degrees Celsius.  For every 10 KM/H on a motorcycle, it feels one degree cooler.  We were going 100 KM/H, so it felt like -8 degrees Celsius.  And, as we drove, it was just not getting any warmer.  In fact, it dipped to zero degrees a couple of times when we drove through the shade of the trees and the mountains.  After the first 120 KM, we had to stop in Fort Steele to try and warm up.  We could hardly get our gloves and helmets off because our hands were so cold.  And then the pain as they started to warm up!  We grabbed a coffee and a snack in the little general store and wondered around the souvenir section trying to warm up.  I could not stop shivering and then I came across the store cat, Bella, sleeping in her little bed and I petted her for awhile.  I felt better afterward – I think it just distracted me from thinking about how cold I was.

By the time we left Fort Steele, the temperature had risen a couple more degrees to a balmy 11 degrees Celsius.  With the slight increase in temperature and adding a little bit extra rain gear, we felt warmer.  We were actually able to enjoy the last stretch of Highway 3 into Fernie.  It is really a beautiful approach to the town.

We arrived in Fernie just in time to have lunch with Jeremy’s Nana and visit with his aunts.  Nana had made homemade cauliflower and cheese soup and it was the perfect remedy for being chilled to the bone.

After our visit in Fernie, we were finally warm and ready to be tourists again.  We stopped in Sparwood, British Columbia, to see the largest truck in the world.  We had visited this attraction before, many years ago, but decided we were due to see it again and be awed by its sheer size.  We took some touristy photos again and then navigated back out to Highway 3.

Highway 3 is a nice, gentle ride through the mountains and it led us all the way through the Crowsnest Pass and into Alberta.  Once again, everywhere we looked we could have been snapping postcard-like photos of mountains and valleys, but we had a lot of KMs to cover today, so we only stopped once to take a picture of the Rockies and the wind turbines just before Pincher Creek.  The wind turbines were spinning, but we already knew it was windy.  The wind gusts were just as strong if not stronger than the Columbia gorge outside of Portland, but today, they were more predictable and only coming from one direction.  We could lean in towards the wind and actually feel like you were in control, rather than the wind.

The land began to level out the closer we got to Medicine Hat, Alberta.  We started to see more and more farms, tractors, and grain elevators.  We definitely got a taste of what Saskatchewan will be like tomorrow – only Saskatchewan will probably be flatter.  Alberta has lots of bugs too.  We definitely had a much larger collection of bugs on our visors by the time we got to our hotel in Medicine Hat than anywhere in the United States that we visited.