Bikely map

There was another early start today, since the Moose Jaw host is the single father of a son who’s old enough to take care of himself (and get himself to school, etc.) if left home alone, but young enough for it to seem prudent not to leave him alone with near-strangers in the house. Since he had to leave for work at around 6:20am, that’s when we hit the road.

Chris had managed to grab some breakfast on the way out, and had the good sense to top up his water the night before. I had done no such clever things, so I pulled aside at the first service stop (about 5km into the ride) to grab some food and top up my water, while Chris rode on in the expectation that I’d catch up to him. Sure enough, I caught back up with him at around km 45.

I took a few more pictures along the way, noting that things really seemed to be getting flatter.

and also grabbed a shot when Regina first noticeably peeked over the horizon (actually, I think it was out behind a small town, grain terminal, patch of trees, or other such obstacle):

We managed to get into town around noon and Chris went off looking for a shop that could replace his tire (the small town shops like Big Sky, having a small market to serve, didn’t have the configuration of tire he was looking for; it turns out that it wasn’t available in Regina either), while I decided to roam around downtown and see what things were like.

Right around the retail core of the city, I found that for the first time in quite some time, I was in a large enough city for there to be hot dog carts, and had myself a sausage for lunch. I also figured that I might want to drop into some of the places downtown, but being a large-ish city, I should check what sort of theft risk my bike (and all the gear on it) would be exposed to. Since a couple of bike cops were riding by, I figured that knowing this sort of thing would be right up their alley, and was advised that Regina’s actually got quite a lot of crime, and while the theft risk isn’t quite at Vancouver levels, I shouldn’t expect anything not locked down to still be there when I come back to it. I remembered hearing a while back that Regina has had the highest per-capita murder rate in Canada for some considerable number of years in a row, and figured that the information I was getting probably wasn’t too heavily filtered by having come from someone who spends his professional life exposed to crime.

So, not feeling particularly confident in my ability to safely lock up my bike+gear, I contented myself to just cruise around the city for a bit before showing up at the warmshowers host.

When I did show up though, I was amazed at the scope of the home shop set up in the basement. Not only was there basically a complete shop worth of tools (and assorted parts and supplies), but there were also vintage/rare/otherwise interesting tools in there to boot. I took this opportunity to clean/relube the drivetrain, retape the handlebars, and retune the rear derailleur so that the shifts would actually fall on the indices in the shifter.

Also, in addition to his minor obsession with bike and bike tools, this particular host (a retired elementary school teacher) also has a bit of a thing for pipes and pipe tobacco (having a little over 100 different pipes, some large assortment of different tobacco varieties seemingly in every nook in the house, and having come in 7th in a recent slow smoking competition, where he had been able to keep smoking the same 3g of tobacco, without relighting it, for somewhere in the neighbourhood of an hour and 10 minutes). It probably would have been interesting to stay for a rest day (which Chris did), but the weather network was forecasting the first tailwinds in over a week, so…