Today we left the quaint little western town of Winthrop and head into Canada and then onto Kamloops where we will spend the night.

With a 9am departure it was a pretty cruisy start to our morning, consisting of wandering the street in search of breakfast and then a spot of window shopping as there really wasn’t much open.

With more miles being covered today the day felt a lot like a transportation leg as we didn’t have as many sight-seeing stops – rather they were functional stops – fuel, water, feed and rest. Therefore it isn’t a big blog today.

A couple of highlights for the day

– a lesson for the group, If you are at the back of a pack and we make a turn you better wait for the next rider otherwise they may miss the turn… Or in our case 3 riders. It’s always a bad sign when the support van turns up and not all riders are accounted for. Opps. We found them so it was all good.

– free ride. With the final 50km or so before getting to Kamloops having no turn-offs we could just ride. This was a good opportunity to get to know the bike better and to open it up and let it roll through the corners at a good speed to understand how it behaves.

– catching up with Keith who I rode with in Spain a couple of years ago. Keith lives in Vancouver and rode over to say hi. It was great catching up on the passed couple of years and reminiscing on our great ride in the Pyrenees in 2016.

At our first fuel stop (where we lost a few riders) I had a chat to a few of the old Harley hands to see what gears they typically run on the roads we were riding. Clearly I ride very different.! They were running 5th and 6th for most of it including the corners where as I never saw 6th (as it just doesn’t have any pull at the speeds we were doing) and 3 and 4 for corners as I was attacking corners more like a sports bike rather than simply cruising around.

Lunch today was quite late in a lovely little town in Canada called Peachland on the edge of Okanagan Lake. It looks like a nice little place to just sit and chill. We didn’t get much of a chance to do either.

Here are a few more pictures from the day

Making friends… well I can’t say that I’m on first names basis with the big Harley but we certainly have an understanding. And that consists of me being a bit more mellower on my riding style and it will do things that are generally not in it’s character. So I guess we are both having to compromise. Does that mean we are becoming friends?

However, one thing that I really struggled with today was the buffeting from the small screen that is on the handlebar fairing. It got so bad at one point I started loosing focus on what was going on up ahead as my helmet was being buffeted so bad. The screen is both too high and too low. It’s just wrong. So I have got them to pull the screen off altogether and give that a go.

Tomorrow we head into the mountains to Jasper.