May 28, 2016
A reunion in Medicine Hat: So, shall we do some cycling?
Those of you paying attention to the notes from Friday the 27th of May will already be aware that I spent the night in a place called Seven Persons. This is clearly a ridiculous name. It should be Seven People. Or perhaps, even more appropriately No People, because that is approximately how many people I saw. But it was a great place, because it had a park with toilets that served as a very nice place for an all-over morning wash (remember toilets are called washrooms in Canada, so I assume my behavior was entirely appropriate.) And there was a bandstand type thing with functioning electric sockets too. It was a great place to urban wild camp, but there was sadly no wifi connection, so I give it four out of five stars.
Anyway, if you thought Seven Persons was a ridiculous name, wait until you hear where I was heading towards as I set off across the prairies once more - Medicine Hat. What does that even mean? Medicine Hat. Anyway, on my way I met two female cycle tourists coming the other way and we stopped to chat. They’d come all the way from Toronto and were going to Vancouver. Good for them. But it was another female cycle tourist I was more interested in meeting today. Those of you paying attention will already know who I’m taking about. That’s right. Vivian.
We had kept in touch since saying goodbye a week earlier in Cochrane. Since then I’d diverted down to Waterton while Vivian took a couple of rest days and then headed diagonally south-east towards Medicine Hat on a much more direct course. Fate meant that we were going to be in the same place at the same time and as we were both now heading solidly east for weeks across uninspiring landscapes, it made sense to join forces.
Vivian had spent the night in Medicine Hat whilst I was actually able to bypass the large urban centre, and so I’d suggested that we meet at a gas station just outside the city right on the main (and only) highway east. I thought it was an obvious meeting point, a big red gas station on the only road. It seemed foolproof.
We had agreed to meet at the gas station at 11:30 a.m. but, once again buoyed by a nice tailwind, I managed to get there by 10:30 a.m. I stopped to see if I could connect to wifi outside the gas station because I do love wifi. I was in this instance unsuccessful, but whilst I was trying a peculiar old man named William came to chat with me.
"I’ve seen you guys riding around with all this gear before,” he said, in a cheerful manner, "and I’ve always wanted to ask this…”
He paused for quite a long time. I knew what he was going to say. I knew exactly what he was going to say.
“How far do you cycle in a day?”
Lucky for William I was in a good mood, and he was much bigger than me, so I told him, and then quickly turned the tables and asked him questions. He said he had hitch-hiked from Winnipeg (a thousand kilometres away) in order to buy a pick-up truck and he was now driving it back home. That’s a bit like someone in London hitch-hiking to Italy to buy a new car and drive it home. I liked William. He was nuts.
William left and I was about to do the same - I planned to go and look for wifi somewhere else and then come back in 45 minutes for my rendesvous with Vivian - when another pick-up truck pulled up next to me on the gas station forecourt. From the passenger seat jumped a small orange bundle of smiling energy. It was Vivian. As the male driver hauled her bike out of the back of the truck I greeted her and enquired as to what she was doing.
Turns out she had got lost and, worried that she would miss me and have to cycle on alone, she’d flagged down this truck. I was still a bit confused as to how she could have so much trouble finding a bright red gas station on the only road east out of town, but after a barely believable conversation during which I learnt that Vivian could not read a map, follow gps directions, or tell me how many metres in a kilometre I began to understand.
| Heart | 1 | Comment | 0 | Link |
It was during our gas station reunion that I realized how Vivian probably really could use my help if she was going to get across Canada. She went on to list, once again, all the things that had gone terribly wrong for her over the past week. The tales of her cycling continuously into constant headwinds on her shorter route made me chuckle a little - I had enjoyed tailwinds almost the whole way myself. As well as the headwind Vivian had suffered through the rain, apparently coming very close to quitting because of the weather but battling on to Medicine Hat where she had suffered even more woe. A solar battery that was supposed to have been mailed to her had not arrived and the woman in the post office had been very mean to luckless Vivian.
As this trail of complaints flowed at a hundred miles an hour from this little girl, I wondered just what I had got myself into. Would it not have been easier to go on alone without Vivian? Perhaps, but that would not make for a good movie script, and goodness, at least I would have some company for the long, long prairies ahead. I waited for my new sidekick to pause for a short breath between whines and quickly chipped in with “So, shall we do some cycling?”
Luckily our first day back riding together was a great one. We had an awesome tailwind, which Vivian seemed to attribute to me, and when we stopped for a break in the village of Irvine after 20 kilometres, we were lucky enough to find a little park with a picnic bench. “This is so much better than sitting at the side of the highway to eat” Vivian noted, correctly.
Fifteen kilometres after Irvine we arrived at the Alberta visitor centre, which meant we were both almost at the end of our second province. With places to stop and take a break understandably rare we paused here too, and found the nicest of visitor centre staff. They had a guestbook for all the cyclists that came through, and even had a little candy giftpack to give each of us. This was turning into a really great day.
We soon passed the border and were in Saskatchewan (by the way, this blog post has been way too long, and in the interest of catching up with the blog, that’ll be the last time I type Saskatchewan.) The wind was still strong at our backs and we didn’t stop for another 40 kilometres as we raced quickly across the flat green landscape, distracted only by the sight of hundreds of prairie dogs (which are in fact not dogs, but rodents) popping out of burrows alongside the road. Of course in the barren terrain there was once again the problem of where we could camp, although this was solved by a big patch of trees around the turn for the village of Piapot. For security we camped at the back of them, although this security was called into question when a herd of bulls wandered over from the field behind us. They didn’t seem to enjoy our presence very much and one or two of them made rather scary and aggressive noises as I walked around setting up my tent and making dinner. There was a short barbed wire fence between us, but that seemed wholly inadequate once one bull started lowering its head and kicking the dirt as if preparing a charge. I didn’t know what could be making it so angry. “Maybe its because you’re wearing red?” Vivian pointed out, also correctly.
Today's ride: 142 km (88 miles)
Total: 50,549 km (31,391 miles)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 4 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |