This is the first in a series of posts about our bicycling trip down the Icefield Parkway, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.
This day had a lot of moving parts…
It started the night before. We finished packing our bikes (and everything else), and then met Julie at the rental place to get our ground transportation, a huge pickup truck we rented one way for the trip to JFK. (This got Ben off the hook — he’d come up to be our backup driver in case the truck rental feel through.) We all trooped up the block afterward, to John & Donna’s, where Doug & Lori were porch-visiting, to say our hellos and goodbyes.
We got up in the morning, ate our breakfast and loaded the bikes, then said our goodbyes to Ben. We were giving our friend’s daughter Emma a ride to the airport with us, so she was our next pick-up; the last stop before we hit the road for real was Julie’s house.
Next came the drive to JFK. I can’t say that this part of the trip was pleasant exactly, but I’ve experienced worse on the Verrazano and the Belt Parkway, and the truck was easier to drive than I expected. We were there, with the truck returned and our stuff unloaded in front of the departures terminal, in just under three hours.
Checking in the bikes went pretty smoothly (not surprising — we might not have ever done this before, but it was old hat to the airline), ditto security and boarding. And then we sat on the runway for an hour and a half before we took off. Something something, NYC airspace closures and backups…
That put us way behind schedule, and when we finally we arrived at our Warm Showers hosts (after baggage, customs, midnight bike assembly in the airport, getting our next rental, and travel through Calgary) it was after 2:00 AM. Thank goodness they were sweethearts, and gracious, and they’d waited up for us. We chatted with them for a bit, then crashed and slept like the dead.
