June 28, 2015
The Cycling Gods are Happy Again: Day 26 - Ft. Qu'Appelle to Yorkton
There are a couple of basic rules you should follow when picking out a spot to pitch your tent in a popular campsite. First be on the lookout for larger groups of folks that look to be under 20 who are wearing board shorts and or bikini's and with a truck to person ratio of about 1:1.
The seasoned camper will spot this right away and pitch their tent a good distance from them. The greenhorn may miss this clue and may have to look for another one.
This could be it. If you're walking past their site at about 7 pm and notice a 3 hp honda generator running and a 3 ft tower speaker beside the picnic table, this is a pretty obvious sign you should be camping well away from here.
If you miss both of these, well, it's your own damned fault.
We crawled into the tent at 10 pm, looking forward to a good sleep and an early start. At 12 there was some pretty horrible music happening with even more banal 'conversation'. At 2 am another camper entered into a fairly heated discussion with the generator group.
Nothing changed.
At 5 am the sun started to come up and the generator stopped as did the music. I think it ran out of gas.
We got up at 6 am to an overcast but warm and dry morning. Breakfast made and camp all packed up, we were cycling away by 8. We actually had a pretty good night in spite of the yahoos beside us, and as I pointed out, we had ample warning to pick a different site.
In the morning, we usually start at a gentle pace and have a wide ranging conversation about whatever is on our minds. The tandem is a pefect vehicle for this (no pun intended) and this morning was one of the best for this. Overcast, but with a very high cloud ceiling, warm and very calm. Perfect cycling weather.
Kirsten brought up that Curtis and Andrew, the two guys we met a few days earlier who are biking cross-country and talking to schools and kids groups to raise awareness of the impoortance of living healthy lifestyles, were doing the right thing but that they had their work cut out for them based on what we saw in this campground.
It was a very nice place, and the people we saw were friendly and seemed pretty happy (generator crowd not included) but to put it bluntly, the vast majority were overweight and seemed completely dependent on thier vehicles. Kirsten saw people driving ~200 m to go the toilet building! Some of the kids has electric 'cars' that they were driving around the campsite. And 'camping' seemed to entail hauling a couple of tonnes of metal around with you. There's got to be a better way and we hope Curtis and Andrew have success. I know on CGOAB it's like preaching to the choir, but we all need to promote this.
We also saw the volunteer fire department springing into action and this prompted a discussion of all the things that are necessary to have a proper functional community (which we both would say Ft. Qu'Appelle has). This got us to speculating on what would have likely happened if the RCMP would have shown up at the campsite last night because of complaints about the 'generator' group. Given the high profile police cases in Missouri and Baltimore recently, the conversation then morphed into policing philosophy and how the application of policing would be markedly different depending on if the underlying philisophical culture was one of maintaining law and order or one of law enforcement. We both agreed that a place where 'maintaining" rather than 'enforcing' is where we would like to live.
By the time we reached this conclusion, we had climbed out of the valley and were cruising down the largely traffic deserted highway at 25 + km/hr thanks to a nice tailwind. No concentrating on keeping on the line, no fighting traffic or wind, no feezing or sweating. Just cruising and talking.
Every morning should be like this. If you ever wondered what we did for 6 plus hours a day on the bike, I've just described a good chunk of it.
The first real traffic we saw was at about 9:30. A line of about 15 shined up' Vintage American lron' coming at us. Most were 60's and 70's muscle cars, with a few older classics (a '40's Packard??).
Yes, it was Sunday morning and the boys were out with their toys. Windows down, arm out the window, hair blowng in the wind (if there was any left). Some things are the same wherever you go. When we did our Rhine trip in '13 we saw the same thing just outside Schaffhausen Switzerland. The cars were different, Mercedes and BMW's rather than Chevy's and Fords, but the 'boys' were the same. Sunday morning Show & Shine. We waved and kept cruising along with our tail wind.
We made great time to Melville (85 km in 3 hrs) and pulled in looking for a place to grab lunch. After grabbing a chocolate milk at the Co-op gas station (what else ... we need fuel too) Kirsten started chatting to the gas jockey, Erin Flanigan. He was very interested in our trip, and he's lived and worked in all parts of Canada. We swapped stories and he sent us along to the best 'Sunday buffet' in Melville. It was good, and we were well fueled for the last 40 km to Yorkton.
As we were leaving Melville, which is a main CN Rail maintnence stop, we saw what could be our 'historical monument' - a late model steam engine and caboose in a park about 200 m off the highway. We pulled off on a side road and tried to make it over to the engine to check it out. About 15 minutes later after navigating a maze of park and campsite roads, we arrived at the engine only to find it behind a chain link fence with a notice that if we were interested in a 'tour' of the museum (old station bulding also inside the fence) we would need to call and arrange a tour. I'm sure that the folks involved in this would be very accommodating, and interesting, but we decided to pass and just pedal on. Didn't even take a picture, which I'm ticked at myself now for.
The rest of the ride into Yorkton was uneventful but we lost our tailwind and for the last 20 km. Our route shifted to straight north and the wind also shifted from west to north west, and picked up speed. In other words we now had a head wind.
When we got to Yorkton it was only 3 pm and we still had a lot of time to knock off a few more km's. Our route from here is straight west and with the wind, we could pretty easily make Roblin Manitoba, the next sizeable town, 80 km away. This would make this a 200 km day, doable, but we weren't sure what would be on the other end. We checked the forecast and the weather tommorrow is supposed to be the same as today, around 30 c with a good west to north-west wind. We decided to stay in Yorkton, get a hotel, do laundry, have a good nights sleep, and, honest, get up early and try for a 180 km run to Dauphin tomorrow. Dauphin will be the last good sized town in Manitoba until we get close to Winnipeg. We'll be in full on lake and forest country, we can see we are already getting into that transition phase here.
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Song of the Day:
Rapid Roy by Jim Croce ....
'Rapid Roy that stock car boy, he's too much to believe,
'Ya know he's always got a pack of cigarettes, rolled up in his tee shirt sleeve,
'He's got a tatoo on his arm that says Baby, he's got another one that just says Hey,
'But every Sunday afternoon he's a dirt track demon in his '57 Chevrolet'
The first 'town' we came by this morning after leaving Ft. Qu"Appelle had a sign saying that their 'demolition derby' had been cancelled, and about 15 minutes later we saw the 'Sunday Drivers' out in their steeds. This song immediately came into my head and would not leave. It's a classic summertime feel good song from the '70's and it still works now. It's too bad Jimmy died so young (missed the 27 club by three years)we could have used more of his music.
I put on music in the afternoon, mornings are reserved for talking and listening to birds, cows, trucks, etc), so after lunch I put this on first and yes, it's song of the day! Lot's of other good stuff from Jeff Healy and Janis Joplin to name a few, but they'll have to wait for another day.
Historical Monument of the day:
We tried ... but couldn't get in to see the trains! Should have a least taken a picture.
Today's ride: 124 km (77 miles)
Total: 2,488 km (1,545 miles)
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