Bikely map

After waking up at about 8am, the extra time spent dealing with insects and wandering over to fetch food had me leaving closer to 10:30 than the 10am departure time I would have expected from my waking time while camping. Not having picked up breakfast foods on my way out of Kenora, I breakfasted on some of the peanut brittle that Gavin had sent me, dipped in the spreadable chocolate that Graydon had sent.

The terrain I had started around was a little peculiar in that it showed signs of being farmed almost as prairie.

Riding through this for a while, I pulled into Dryden at around noon, stocked up on groceries, topped up my water, and generally availed myself of some of the other benefits of civilization.

Shortly after leaving Dryden, I encountered a sign (actually several, but I only photographed one) referencing a placename that seemed remarkably similar to Lake Wobegone:

I also noticed that I still bear a little ummm.. emotional scarring from BC in that when I saw this bit of roadway ahead

my immediate reaction was dismay at the thought of having to descend several hundred feet into a valley and climb back out of it again. In reality, the road levelled out almost immediately after disappearing over that roll, and continued across, pretty much completely horizontally, to the piece of roadway in the distance, where there was a short climb back out which hardly even required downshifting.

A little while further along, the forest began to look somewhat ominous (though the automatic colour correction on the camera killed that somewhat)

and I began to feel a dull not-quite-ache in my ankle, worrying me that I might be reinjuring it.

Shortly after this, it began to rain, and then to rain hard. I put on most of my raingear, but nelected the overshoes, figuring (from what I could see of the clouds — not enough to make an accurate judgement it seems) that the rain would pass over fairly quickly. Instead my shoes got wet, so I decided that I’d ride the rest of the way to Ignace and grab a motel room there where my shoes could dry, I wouldn’t have to deal with the mess of post-rain bugs, and I wouldn’t have to deal with the mess of late-evening bugs from taking such a long day.

Of course, once I made it in, the town was on a boil water advisory, so it wasn’t as great a motel stay as I might have hoped for, but it was still nice.

Also noteworthy: the odometer on the bike cleared 3000km today.