Day13: A long - 70 mi - but nice day on The Ontario Prairie
Wednesday June 26, 2019
I did another longer than expected day, but this time, in the serenity of the Ontario Prairie, it wasn't at all stressful. It was so quiet all I could hear was bike sounds - interestingly my bike seat was not creaking - and bird sounds. The red-winged blackbirds spent a lot of time chasing me out of their territories today. That was quite nostalgic since I've experience that on many tours on the US plains.
I had tried for a 100 km - 62 mile - day but rode 70 miles in six and a half hours. Almost half of the extra mileage was because Gmaps screwed up and was routing me south instead of north. I bailed on that and then tried using Guru maps to route me. I never used it before because I hadn't had enough data available on my phone and it uses that data to route as you ride. I was interested to see how well that worked and chagrined to discover that losing that data connection just stops it from routing without letting me know! As a result of those two screwups, I wasted almost 5 miles on misrouting just getting out of town.
After the Guru screw-up, I used Guru as my map and improvised my routing as I rode. That worked well in than I got off of bumpy roads for smoother ones and changed my routing to favor getting lunch during the ride. It also let to me getting to the better of my two motel choices which was a little farther away. My decision to route by Oil Springs led to my riding past Wyoming ON - the biggest town on my ride today - thinking I there was and east west road there - there isn't - and then just riding on farther north which led me to ride CR 22 and go north past the 402 express way which meant I got to the Countryside motel first. This place looked like the best of the two choices and it meets my needs for only a few USD more than half of what my room last night cost!
In the morning, I'll stop for breakfast at the Mcds in Strathroy, ON which is close to were I'm staying and on my route to Woodstock via London. Tonight's supper was one of my tortilla wraps and I expect I'll be having another one for first breakfast in the morning.
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