Cardston, Alberta - Wednesday did not start on a good note.

I had planned to spend the day toiling over the "Going-To-The-Sun Road," a legendary route that runs east-west through Glacier National Park, rising to 6,600 feet as it passes over some of the greatest mountain scenery in the world.

Then I happened to notice a newspaper headline: "Going-To-The-Sun-Road may open by Saturday."

Well, shoot.

The road is closed all winter and generally opens in mid-May to mid-June. This being June 21, I had assumed it was open already. I was, as it turned out, wrong. This meant I would have to bypass the road in favor of the Marias Alternate, a shorter but by all accounts less interesting route around the park.

However, if being a reporter taught me anything, it's that you can't believe what you read in the paper. So I called up the Glacier Park info line and got told the same thing: closed until Saturday. Then I called the line again and waited for a homo sapien to answer. This wonderful human being told me that the road was closed, but that bikers could sneak over after the road crews went home.

A-ha!

So I rode into the park, where the ranger at the front gate gave me a contradictory report: closed to everyone. But I hadn't come that far to turn around, so I decided to err on the side of blind optimism. I pulled into a campsite and discovered a logjam of about five other bicyclists, some of whom had been twiddling their thumbs for four days waiting for the road to open. They had heard the same thing: wait until the workers go home that night, then head over.

So that's what we did. I piddled away a day in the park, taking a short boat trip and visiting the incredible Lake McDonald Lodge, with its three-story wood atrium, blazing fire (even in July) and hordes of animal-head ornamentation. Just sitting there made me feel like Hemingway.

Then we began our ascent, passing various "road closed signs" until we got to the official 'don't go past here' spot, manned by a DOT employee. She went home at 5:30, and we sat at the roadblock until 7:00, waiting for the sounds of road clearing ahead of us to stop. Then we went for it.

What followed was the most wonderful cycling experience of my life. Under any conditions, the Going-to-the-Sun Road is phenomenal. It's surrounded on all sides by massive glaciated rock faces that rise up to sharp mohawk-shaped peaks. Layers of snowcaps gradually dissolve into forested slopes far below, through which you could trace the paths of meandering rivers and even the steep, winding road we were ascending. The left side of the road shot straight into the stratosphere, the right side straight down hundreds of feet.

And we had it all to ourselves. No cars to dodge, to motorcycles roaring past, no trail of impatient drivers trying to pass on narrow curves. Just the sound of me pedaling (and panting) my way to the top. I'm not sure, but I may have been the first cyclist of the entire year to go over the pass and down the other side. By the time I made it to the first campsite 12 miles over the pass, it was 9:30 p.m. and just growing dark.

Unless something truly amazing happens to me in the next 6 weeks or so, Glacier National Park will remain, both literally and figuratively, the high point of my trip.

The next day - that would be yesterday - was certainly a letdown. Instead of the gradual descent I was hoping for (and that my legs were screaming for)I found myself heading up to another pass, this one about 5,200 feet up. This was where my body finally gave out on me. It felt like I was stopping on every hill, and I was giving serious consideration to actually walking the bike for the first time this trip. It didn't come to that, but there was much cursing and gnashing of teeth.

But I was finally up and over, and sometime yesterday afternoon I arrived in the low, rolling fields of southern Alberta. I'm not sure why, but the Northern Tier Route takes a short jog into Canada here before heading back to Montana. Since my body was demanding it, and since I enjoy Canada (polite, neat people with funny accents; new and exciting candy bars and soft drinks; socialized medicine), I decided to take my first day off here in Cardston, Alberta. Or, as I call it, Thrillsville.

First of all, Cardston isn't just Canadian, it's Mormon. It's the home of the first Mormon Temple built outside of the U.S. (a pretty awe-striking building, actually; I'm gonna visit it this afternoon.) So people aren't just neat and polite, they're also teetotalers. And the local bookstore appears to be full of books about how best to handle your two-year mission. I feel like I'm on Mars.

Cardston is also home to two major cultural monuments: first, the "Fay Wray Fountain," dedicated to the "King Kong" star who grew up here. I was crossing my fingers that the fountain would look like an ape on top of the Empire State Building, but no go, though the sign pointing to the (rather lame) fountain itself does have a giant monkey on it.

Second, there is the "Remington Carriage Museum," which is chiefly memorable in my mind for having actually been mocked on "The Simpsons." (In the episode last year when Patty and Selma Bouvier kidnap MacGyver, they use a slideshow of their visit to the Carriage Museum to get him to overcome his Stockholm Syndrome and take off.) The great thing about this is that the electronic sign outside the museum actually notes, "As Seen on The Simpsons," thus completely missing the point that the show was poking fun at how impossibly dull the place is. I got a big laugh out of that one.

All that being said, it's an altogether green and pleasant place to take a day off. In fact, I'm going to head over to the campsite right now and enjoy a hearty lunch of Cadbury candy bars and dill pickle-flavored Doritos. Oh Canada!