Saturday July 25, 2015

An interesting start to the day. I woke up at 5:30 and went back to sleep for an hour. We got up at 6:30 and had a leisurely breakfast, packed the tent and headed out. Then we looked at the Garmin it was 9:50 am. It never takes us three and a half hours to pack up. No, it didn’t take us that long, we had another time change coming into Manitoba! Another hour lost.

The weather was getting hot and we had 80+ kms to cycle, we should have got up earlier.

We had a bit of a headwind today, nothing much we were still averaging 20kph but it seemed like hard work for both of us. Neither of us really enjoyed the ride much. At one point during the ride I kept saying I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored – like a kid that has just started their summer holidays. The ride wasn’t that boring, we had some undulations and the road was bendy, but the scenery was the same as it has been since we came into the prairies – miles and miles of fields and not much else. I asked Ralf how come Texas wasn’t so boring, but he said that there were mountains in the back-ground, the scenery was different every day.

We finally arrived in Brandon, very hot and tired. Why is it that drivers on single-lane roads think it is safe to pass cyclists but run the other guy into the ditch. A couple of times today as we were coming into Brandon the cars would give us lots of room passing us, but almost cause head-on crashes with the cars coming in the opposite direction. Do they not know they have another pedal on the floor called the brake and they could wait until it is clear to pass, instead of hitting the accelerator and scaring the Bejesus out of the other car driver.

We arrived at the Turtle Crossing camp-site and the owner was very friendly. She said she always gives touring cyclists a deal $10.00 for the site. The showers are free, albeit timed, and there are laundry facilities. The whole of the campsite was under water two years ago. When they bought the campsite they had over 200 pitches, now they only have 35 sites and a few that they can use for tenters. We had one of those sites and it was very gravelly (the river ran through this area) and very buggy. We cooked near the shower block which had a picnic table and lots of room.

It was really hot when we eventually settled in the tent – 25 degrees at 9:30pm and very buggy, with mossies and other bugs.  This bug was on the inside of the fly, but outside of the tent!