Foreword: This hotel. Was fucking. Evil. I’m surprised we didn’t die. John reminisces how the hallway to the laundry room was flooded with the lights out. He recalls thinking, “Matti’s going to get fucking murdered”. John’s whole thesis was that between the two of us, I would be the one to die cycling across Canada. Maybe he’d get away, but maybe not. Either way I’d go first.
Upon re-reading this post, I realized I wasn’t exaggerating much throughout it. Which is strange for me. There really were two little girls dressed in all white, and a little boy in his pyjamas singing his ABCs with a train set.
This particular night was another tough one for sleeping. We slept in this weird lobby (see pictures below) on the couch up on a balcony. Below us in the main hall was a piano. It was pretty big, echoey room. We both recall how in the middle of the night, piano music started playing. Unsure whether it was a ghoul or a vengeful ghost or something like that, I recall peeking over the banister and sighing a huge sigh of relief to learn that it was just a little Asian boy. Of course it was a little Asian boy.
Little did we know that this would just be the first of many run-ins we’d have with the family that helped us by offering a place to shower. Mike and his family were highly memorable, key players in this trip for John and I.
Haunted Hotel
On the seventh day it rained… hard.
John and I are stranded just 10 km outside of Revelstoke. There was a mudslide just as we were approaching, and then another just a couple kilometers behind us. It’s been raining all day, and we cycled against the wind the entire time. There were also occasional pulses of freezing cold air where the temperatures would just suddenly drop at least 10°C whenever we passed small waterfalls. At one point we stopped at a zip-lining place to inquire about their prices. It was just closing. Had we not inquired, we may actually have died in the mudslide because we only missed it by about 30 minutes.
The hotel we’re stranded at is really old and eerie. It has a definitive Scandinavian flavour to it, and actually reminds me of the movie The Shining. The power is on and off, and many of the halls are just black. I’m half expecting an elevator to open up with a flood of blood. There are two twin girls dressed in white conspicuously observing me as I type this entry. All blog and no cycle makes Matti a dull boy…
Today we learned that our panniers fail at keeping our stuff dry. We had to put everything in the hotel’s dryer which is quite the hike through dark hallways from this creepy lobby. Sadly, there are no vacancies tonight as many people are sandwiched in between these two mudslides with no place to go. We’ll be sleeping in the lobby, I guess. Fortunately a family was kind enough to offer us their place to shower, dry off, and warm up. Canadians truly are ridiculously helpful.
Tomorrow we head for Golden. Hopefully the weather is better because it’s apparently quite mountainous. It’s our longest distance yet and there are apparently no small towns in between.
A little boy is literally right next to us in the lobby in his pyjamas playing with an old train set, circling round and round and singing his abcs. Oh. My. God.
