Bikely map

Having stayed up later than planned on the 1st making journal updates, I overslept a bit, and after swinging by Canadian Tire to pick up a Manitoba road atlas, I wasn’t really going until about noon. Once again, the substantial headwinds had returned, so it was back to slow, difficult slogging.

Still having some left-over pizza from when I got into Brandon, I used that for my mid-morning snack, and remembering it to have been a pretty substantial pizza when I was first eating it, I didn’t hit the snacks as hard as I would have had I been eating an apple. Having neglected to pick up more snacks or dinner while in Brandon, I stopped in Carberry (I was on that particular detour anyhow to avoid shoulderless stretches of the Trans-Canada) and, feeling in a bit of a foul mood, decided that perhaps my body was unhappy with my currenty supply of micronutrients. After all, I’d swapped in some pizza for my “morning” apple. So I grabbed an extra apple to eat right then as a mood booster. I didn’t feel that my mood had been particularly improved by that endeavour, but did feel a bit better for the extra nutrition and resumed along my way.

Not too far out of Carberry, I noticed my front fender to be rubbing against the tire and otherwise misbehaving, so I checked closer and found that the last of the braze-on rack mounting holes had sheared off, so the right side rack was being held entirely in place by its U-bolt (and any forces passed through the fender from its mounts on the left side). I stopped the bike, took off the right front pannier, shifted the rack back into a suitable position, and generously applied some duct tape to hold it all in place until I could get to a bike shop that could provide me with a clamp-on mount.

The quick duct tape fix got me most of the way back out to the highway until the braze-on, and the duct tape wrapped around it started rubbing against some of the spokes. So once again, I got off the bike, dug into my spare parts bag for a nut that I could use (instead of the long-ish braze-on) to hold the fender stays to the rack, cut the braze-on out of the duct tape, replaced it with the nut, wrapped things more tightly to the fork, and continued. There was still a little rubbing, but I decided to leave that problem for when I’d set up camp and had a better opportunity to apply a little more care to how my racks are attached.

Getting to the highway, I was still in a pretty bad mood, so I tried calling home to see if talking to family might help, but it didn’t. Next I tried some chocolate that I’d brought back into my snack assortment, and basically inhaled nearly 500 calories worth of it. This led to the speculation that I’d just been really hungry, but had grown sufficiently weary of snack-monotony that my repulsion to the same snack yet again was masking some of my hunger. That said, I didn’t really feel in a better mood yet.

Continuing along, it started to get a little colder, so I tossed on my fleece, and kept riding. I don’t know if the wind had started to taper off at that time of day, or if I’d just been underdressing, and losing a lot of energy as wasted heat (I’m still leaning towards the latter, given my experience at Paulson Summit), but things got a lot easier, and I was able to put in another 30km or so without feeling it to be too difficult. I also took a couple of pictures along the lines of “wow, the terrain has really gotten flat; just look at how far away that horizon is; it’s almost like open water”:

and finally, I found a tree standing over a flat-topped ridge between two ditches, just off the side of the road, where I decided to set up camp for the night.