Someone moved into my dorm room in the middle of the night. This morning me and Zoe had a chat and breakfasted together before we set off on our ways. She's going to work on a ranch in BC this summer guiding horse riding tours!
I loaded up my bike and wobbled off down the road. It's been a while since I rode it with all the luggage! But after 20km things were back to normal, complete with all the old aches and pains.
It took a while to get out of the city and onto the relatively less busy two-lane highway but there was a wide shoulder all day so I only had to worry about the farm traffic that was sharing the shoulder with me. One tractor that I pulled over for and one monster of a machine that could have driven straight over the top of me and I wouldn't even have to duck! Thankfully he drove around though.
I'm sorry to say that the landscape was boring. Not as flat as I was expecting of the prairies, but pretty flat. And just fields everywhere with woodland in the distance. Nowhere to stop but the hard shoulder and no trees to go behind for a pee.
Between the road and the fields, there's a 10 meter strip of uncultivated land. There are grasses and reeds all shades of green and rusty brown; wildflowers in white and yellow; birds, frogs, groundhogs, chipmunks and musk rats. The wind plays in the grass, bringing out its colours. Behind that 10 meter strip of relative wilderness, fields of monoculture. I imagine the natural prairies were beautiful.
Lots of trains went past today and I have finally seen them stretched out unobscured by trees, corners or hills. They can be 100+ carriages long, stacked two sea containers high! And blasting their horns all the way.
I stopped for lunch at Portage la Prairie then continued to MacGregor, totalling 125km. I had a tailwind all day, which was glorious and it was overcast but still 26 degrees and insanely humid. I'm dreading the day I have to ride into a headwind in the baking sun with no beautiful views to distract me!
After pitching my tent, I went for a beer and cooked my dinner then got pretty bored lying in my tent in the muggy humid heat listening to the angry, dysfunctional family in the trailer a few pitches down. A few bouts of thunder and a bit of rain but it hasn't cleared the air and even at 9pm it's still 26 degrees. Maybe a storm is on its way.
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