Of course we knew when we planned this trip that there would be rain.

There is always rain.

Come to think of it, on our last trip to the Maritimes it rained more days than it was dry. We went so far as to carefully research rain gear and purchase the best available for ourselves. We are ever so thankful to Up-Side Over, our children’s gear sponsor for providing the children with fabulous Marmot rain jackets and pants. They looked fabulous coming out of the packages, tried on in our nice, dry, cheerful living room… then packed away with an almost clinical level of denial.

We’ll never open THAT pannier, I hoped quietly to myself. Ha.

As I write this, I’m snugly tucked in between crisp white sheets in a warm bed at the Fairwinds Motel in Sheet Harbour, Nova Scotia. Things couldn’t be better, or drier. I’ve even had a nice hot cup of tea in the dining room: two sugars, two milks: perfection. It was a long, wet, windy way here.

The last two days have been nothing but rain and wind and more rain. We set out from Stellarton yesterday morning under ominous skies, but still with mid-level denial. We won’t get THAT wet. Even without the rain, the wind was incredible. Pedaling DOWN the hills was work. The flats felt like up hill riding, and up hill… well, there was very little riding. I walked, pushing my heavy laden bike, with Ezra singing his way along side.

Then, the rain started.

At first it was just a few drops, then a steady drizzle, before you know it, an all out downpour. We were cycling across 374, right through about 40 miles of completely empty wilderness. No gas stations, no restaurants, no camp grounds, and certainly no hotels in which to take refuge. No where to use the bathroom or fill a water bottle either, for that matter.

We struggled up hill, against the wind for our requisite thirty miles. Far enough to make the twenty or so miles left to Sheet Harbour seem easy, before we made camp on an old, unused logging road.

We pushed our dripping bikes back off of the road, set up the tent in a drizzle, only to discover that the earth under us was so hard packed from logging trucks that using stakes for our tent was impossible.

So… the children collected rocks, the biggest they could find, to hold out the guy-lines on the tent. We ate our beef stroganoff a hundred yards from the tent (to discourage bears or other scavengers from coming into our tent for food residue) in a steady downpour, the kids laughing all the while.

Our tents were dry and lovely.

Note to self: When planning a major adventure, listen to the man and let him spend the big bucks on TRULY waterproof bags and the expensive “expedition grade tent.”

I thanked him profusely, chiding myself for being tempted to “cheap out” on such things. The night was inky, as only wilderness dark can be and we lay awake listening to the rain and the lonely wolves howling to the moon in the distance.

Morning broke wet. Surprise, surprise.

We lay there a while, still in mild denial, hoping that it would blow over. It didn’t. Finally, there was nothing to do but drop the inner tents and pack them dry, drop the outer tent and pack it wet, suck it up and pedal the twenty two miles we had left in yet more rain.

The children were troopers. They passed the time as we pedaled through puddles by naming the lovely swamps and piles of rock with fabulous storybook names like “moose heaven” and “cougar crag.” I like that about my kids. Just when it seemed we could get no wetter, a huge truck pulling two trailers worth of logs to the pulp mill would barrel past us, jake breaks rattling and spray us from head to toe in a water, diesel, pine sap cocktail as a parting gift. Lovely.

The upside was that the wind had laid, so the ride was much easier. The hills were manageable.

The kids were cheerful (Ezra, singing his version of “It’s raining it’s pouring the old man is snoring, went to bed, bumped his head, woke up and saw blood in the morning, got up, put on a bandaid, went down and made breakfast and sucked it up….”

The ride was short (20 some miles instead of 30 some) and the forest smelled incredible. I think the forest always smells better when it rains. It smelled like Christmas, according to Hannah, and she was right. It was exactly the smell that Yankee Candle tries to replicate with it’s “Balsam Wreath” candle in the winter. Imagine thirty of them, burning all at once in the same room and you’ll approximate the intoxicating, overwhelming evergreen scent we cycled through for hour upon hour. I hope heaven smells like that some of the time.

Megan said it perfectly when we were finally safe and dry in our motel, little boys snoring on the floor all around us during nap time: “It makes us appreciate the little things like dry underwear and showers and a bed.” Yes, it does.

If nothing else, cycling through a deluge breeds thankfulness, and I suppose that is worth it’s weight in gold.

The last two days have not been my favorite of the trip so far. As the Mama, I’m the one responsible for drying ten pairs of feet and packing up a load of wet laundry and then subsequently drying it all. However, it hasn’t been bad either. We had a cheerful night of bonding in the tent and we shared a lovely (dry) cup of tea with ice cream sundaes with the girls tonight after we’d put the boys to bed.

As Tony put it to the children last night at the most miserable point, “We’re learning what we can really do.”

And that is important. I want my kids to learn to do hard things, miserable things, and like it.

Even Megan, who is only a rental, grinned underneath her raincoat last evening as I handed her a soggy plate of stroganoff and salad. Goose bumps were standing up on every inch of her exposed skin as she said, “Mrs. Miller, this is GREAT, it’s so far from anything I’ve ever experienced.” And so it is; great. Rain and all, we’re having a blast!