The Grace Fund of Luck, WI: Day 24

Day 24

This isn’t just beautiful it is AWESOME!! The glacier. The smoke and the smoke disappearing. The beautiful dog. The helicopter carrying the buckets of water. The waterfalls coming down from the glacier. We are nearing the end and we are about at the end!

We are having fun, getting to know each other and Canada a lot better. Did we tell you about the trains? Lots and lots of trains. We’ve frequently seen trains with 100+ cars (today there was one with 132 cars). There have been many train stops where you had to wait for the train to pass for more than 5 minutes. When in Jasper, there were two trains passing (one going each way) and it took over 10 minutes. Reminds me of when I was a kid and had long waits for a train to pass. Anyone else remember that?

A bit of trivia - with all these miles you have a lot of time to think. I have counted the number of cars going past me (my side of the road) many times and have calculated that almost 50,000 cars have whizzed past us while riding through Canada. We had one pass yesterday that was the closest ever. We were on a shoulder that was 3’ wide at best. This SUV was pulling a bigger camper that stuck out on the sides and the camper missed me by about 12”. It wasn’t a thrill. It was a stunner! Mike just said, "WOW"! Yeah, wow.

Rain - This may be the most incredible thing to happen yet. It is raining right now (fairly hard actually). We finished our walking, after our riding, about 15 minutes ago, with no rain at all during either. Last night it rained almost all night but stopped early this morning. In our prescheduled and unchanged days of riding while training there were 42 days scheduled for riding (during the months of June and July) and we never had to face rain during that period. During the past 24 days in Canada we have not faced rain yet during the day. Wouldn’t you agree our God is and Awesome God!?!

We plan to reach Alaska in two days (or maybe the 3rd day). Yes, TWO DAYS! We are a little ahead of schedule for three reasons: 1. No Rain! 2. Getting in shape and picking up the pace. 3. It is actually 73 miles closer than predicted to Alaska.

A few special THANK YOU's...

To our coaches and gear experts, Frank and Duane, at Cyclova in St Croix Falls. The gear they sold to us:

Gloves
Long sleeve shirts and short sleeve shirts
Funny hat
Shoes
EXCELLENT bike (will last the whole trip and worked and wore well)
Hand pump

To Paula Elert, our AMAZINGLY talented, funny, sweet, intelligent, charming gal pal who created and updated the Grace Fund blog daily so that we could keep you current of our daily activities and experiences (OK, Chuck forgot to thank me so I took the liberty to add this one in myself ~Paula). LOL, LMAO, ROTFLMAO, and all those fun acronyms...

Please Please pray for us during the next two days. God Bless You! We hope to see you all SOON!

~The Grace Fund Crew

I went for my prayer walk outside the campground and this guy came up and nipped at me a little bit then followed me for over 2 miles running out and then always back to me. I got back to the campground and he followed me to out site and sat outside the door and waited. Finally I came out to do my computer update and he just sat there with me. I never fed him or gave him water or anything. The owner of the RV park came with a rope and took him away and tied to a tree. He was a beautiful dog, if I could have I’d have brought him home.