My new ride

Can you believe I have my own ATV now? It is a Yamaha Kodiak. It’s a 450, so smaller and less power than Jeff’s 700, but just perfect for me!

I’ve driven a quad a bunch of times, but almost entirely just on our Nova Scotia property to plow the snow. Jeff bought me a new helmet with more chin/face coverage, and took me out to learn how to drive the thing.

At first he did a ton of eye rolling at just how slow I was. What is wrong with putt-putt’in along?

But then we joined up with 8 other friends with quads or side-by-sides and went for a full day adventure!

I couldn’t imagine a nicer group of people. Everyone knew it was my first time out, so they kept me in the middle of the pack while I got more comfortable, and soon I was doing a decent job of keeping up and not holding people back! We were going a good 50-70 km/hr at times!

We visited a really remote old farm.

No one is living here now, so we respectfully looked around and closed the doors tight behind us. Most of the buildings look like someone just walked away one day and never returned, leaving even their food behind.

Animals have been in most of the buildings, especially into the food. There is also evidence of squatters and other people poking around.

There are parts of the farm that are really old, and other parts that were lived in much more recently. Everything was once run off a generator, and even had internet and phone!

Even a piano! This residence was on a second story and had wolf poop outside the door.

We closed the doors up tight so the animals would stay out.

After this we went deep into the woods/bog/swamp/water and even found the mosquitos! I got to drive through deep water, snow, mud, over trees, around trees, even through trees!

Here’s half the posse!

Everyone was really good about stopping and checking on one another, telling me when to switch to 4×4 (for a melting glacier), and to make sure the next person saw which fork the leading pack took.

We stopped a few times for snacks and had a fire once.

We were really muddy. Glad I wore my snow pants! I put almost 190 km on my new ride, and rode for about 9.5 hours. I lifted my butt for every bump, and by the next day, my thighs were so sore, I joked I needed handicap bars to get on and off the toilet! (I’m not sure I was joking!)

Turns out my Fitbit doesn’t understand quad’ing though, and thought I climbed 280 floors on my own. Actually my broken old body agrees with my fitbit. HA!