Bikely map

I got a good timely start (around 8am) in substantial rain, but had strong northwesterly winds which pushed me along quickly enough that I really didn’t care if I was getting rained on. The rain lightened up, and it then rained on and off pretty much all day, getting heavy again once I got close to Medicine Hat.

From Lethbridge to Taber, I’d put on my smog mask, because I’d found back at home that it stuck out over my collar just far enough to stop rain from getting blown down it in most circumstances. That said, I discovered on this little chunk of ride that having to pull my hood back down to take it off provided enough disincentive to stop and eat/drink that I should probably pack it back up and just deal with any rain getting down my collar (especially since the rain had lightened again, and I’d heard that prairie rains don’t stay particularly strong for particularly long).

In Taber, I mailed home a box (the same box in which Graydon had mailed me a care package) containing a few items that I no longer felt compelled to carry with me (like the math papers that I wasn’t reading as planned, or the BC roadmaps that I no longer needed). I kept the smog mask in anticipation of a day or two of considerably worse rain in Ontario (not to mention smog from Toronto creeping all the way up to Sudbury and North Bay).

Another thing discouraged by the rain (and awesome tailwinds; I mean who wants to stop when 35km/h come pretty much effortlessly) was taking pictures. In fact, I took all of two pictures:

Largely to do a “I just zoomed in, can you tell the difference” set of pictures now that I’d made it to the prairies (the only problem is, in Alberta, and even in Saskatchewan, there’s usually some roll or coulee, or just turn in the highway that blows such a game).

One of the downsides of the wind is that it had just as much of a crosswind component as a tailwind component (possibly even a little extra on the crosswind), and that crosswind was coming at me from the highway side. This gave a little extra oomph to any of the air disturbances cause by passing trucks. When they were passing me going the same way, that was actually pretty neat, because I could kinda ride on the wave of air that they were pushing forward. Passing the other way though, I had to brace myself to get smacked in the face hard with a wall of air.

The other downside to the wind was that the last 10km or so of highway into Medicine Hat, instead of going east, turn north into the city. This made the wind into a headwind, and the rain having picked up a bunch for the last push of the ride, it was quite the headwind to deal with.

After fighting through this wind, and counting down every km (and sometimes half-km) I made, I got to the WSL hosts in the Hat, and found that after 5 years of pretty vigorous abuse, I’d finally gotten some water through my jacket (mainly identified because my gloves in the zipped-up front pocket were soaking; my body still felt no wetter than mere sweat from the ride would have made it already). I also checked the weather forecast (discovering that the Weather Network forecasts wind over a much longer time period than Environment Canada does), and saw that a big beast of a storm system was moving in over the prairies, and would be bringing headwinds, likely for the better part of a week. I opened up the possibility of revising my estimated number of days needed to get to Swift Current (previously 1), and that of adding rest days, though it would wreak havoc with any plans to meet up with family in Ottawa (planned for the weekend of June 21, on the assumption of good winds across the prairies).