The Straight and Narrow: - Day 28 Dauphin to The Narrows - And Then We Pedalled...... Cross Canada 2015

June 30, 2015

The Straight and Narrow: - Day 28 Dauphin to The Narrows

Riding a tandem bike has some similarity to taking a labrador puppy for a walk.

Most people smile and wave, lots yell out 'cool bike' (what a cute puppy) and some just have to come over and talk to you and check out the bike (pet the dog). Paul Proulx wanted to pet the puppy.

We got off to another reasonably early start. It was overcast but not nearly as hazy as the day before, and it didn't smell like a campfire either. Trafic was light and amazingly, we had a decent shoulder (sorry about banging on about this but remember Maslow's hierarchy of cyclng needs). The shoulder lasted for 15 km's (sigh) but the traffic remained light. We hade good time to St Rose du Lac, about 55 km, and pulled off the road to have a light snack and take some pics of a catholic shrine to Mary (out of the Ukranian zone and the onion domes and into the French zone and the Mother Mary shrines).

The Mary shrine was in a nice park, and while we were parking our bike (no small feat wth the tandem / labrador) a car pulled into the lot, a guy got out, and he started walking towards us. It was Paul.

He had seen us riding into town, and being a keen cycle tourer, and also trying to talk his wife into getting a tandem, he had to check it out. About an hour later, we had finished swapping stories, talking bikes and tours. Paul and his wife had ridden from Vancouver to St. Rose last year, and he really wanted to complete the trip to St Johns. I hope he left from our encounter with a determination to do it. We left the encounter with a huge amount of local knowledge of road conditions and the best places to bike from here to Winnipeg. We also left with the knowledge that hwy 68 all the way to The Narrows, and past, would be excellent for cycling. Knowing that things will get better had a huge positive affect on our attitude.

We continued on down the road. No traffic, no hills, no wind, good pavement, nice temperatures, bright but no direct sunlight. What's not to like. There's really nothing as far as towns from St. Rose until Erikdale some 106 km away, so there was lots of time to think and talk.

We were one day away from Canada Day, with our country reaching reaching 'middle age' at 148. We were also basically right in the middle of the country with no one around us. It got us thinking that Canada can be almost anything to anyone. The country is physically huge, geographically diverse, largely uninhabited (one of the lowest population densities of any country) yet also one of the most urbanized countries in the world with a tremendously varied ethnic makeup.

So what makes a Canadian?. I'm sure there are at least 33 million different answers to that question, but it reminded me of a conversation I had a few years back when we were living in Vietnam.

Our office had people from Canada, UK, South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. a group of us were shooting the breeze one day about the different countires we all came from. Some of my Vietnamese colleagues were confused about what defined a Candian since the ones they knew all seemed to come from different places and often looked very different from each other. How could this be?

At this point I had another one of my (few) epiphany moments. Anyone CAN be a Canadian. It's a state of mind, not a state of ethnicity. At some point in time, everyone came to Canada from somewhere else and a country was forged from a basic common set of values that people signed up for that were (largely) independent of ethnicity or faith. (I recognise that this gives short shrift to the First Nations people who's culture and rights were largely trampled and (nearly) forgotten).

We're not perfect at this, and we're not the only country that has been created in this mold, but we've done a not bad job of it over the last 148 years and it's incumbant on all of us to ensure we pass on an open, tolerant and fair society to the next generations of Canadians.

Kirsten thinks we need to get back into more populated area's so I'll write about the milkshake flavours that I've had that day. Until that happens, you'll get my pseudo philosophical ramblings.

We got to The Narrows on Lake Manitoba where there's an RV 'resort' and campground and got our tent set up near the lake. Our St Rose friend Paul had charitably said that the Resort and the Narrows had some 'issues', and he was right. Nice enough spot but the camp facilities were close to derelict and there was no potable water available. More rants on this later.

On the bright side we met another pair of cross Canada bikers, Lori from Nelson BC and Tracy from Vancouver. They set out from Victoria about the same time we did and had also met and cycled with Daniel Sweeting (who we met in Princeton) and Bill Brooks (who we met in Kamlopps and who's also got a journal here on CGOB). This won't be the last time we find out we're sharing connections with other trans Canada folks we meet along the way.

Hit the tent early as there was no wifi in the camp area, and the 'restautrant' shut down at 9. Plus the mosquitos were pretty bad. Interestingly, the next morning another Manitoban camper commented how lucky we were that the mosquito's weren't bad this year. I guess it's all a matter of perspective. I shudder to think what they could be like if this "wasn't bad".

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Song of the day:

Wheat Kings by The Tragically Hip ..... The Wheat Kings are a hockey team in Brandon Manitoba, but that's not what this songs about. It's about the story of David Milgaard, a young Winnipeg kid who was wrongly convicted of murder and jailed for 23 years until he was freed. Our country also needs to stand for honesty and justice.

"Twenty years for nothing, well that's nothin' new,

Nobody's interested in something you didn't do"