{"id":19,"date":"2008-05-22T01:59:16","date_gmt":"2008-05-22T05:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/?p=19"},"modified":"2008-10-29T23:21:24","modified_gmt":"2008-10-30T03:21:24","slug":"may-22-medicine-hat-to-maple-creek-106km","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/?p=19","title":{"rendered":"May 22: Medicine Hat to Maple Creek (~106km)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bikely map<\/a><\/p>\n

Dreading the forecast weather, and having put away a reasonably long day the day before, I slept in a little, ate a hefty breakfast, procrastinated with weather reports, and got a late start.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The weather generally varied between miserable, and horribly difficult. I regularly found myself stopping in the face of the wind just about as frequently as I had been stopping on my first climbs through the mountains. In spite of having relatively modest terrain like<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

I still found the short, shallow grades to be remarkably difficult, and repeatedly cursed anyone who had ever told me that the prairies are flat. I rather suspected that a large part of my difficulty was arising not simply from the fact of riding straight into 40km\/h (gusting to 60km\/h) winds, but that my raingear was billowing out, and I was practically trying to push a small parachute into the wind.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, after about 30km, the rain backed off (it would have been farther had I not dawdled at gas stations and in rest stops, trying to wait out some of the worst of the weather), so I was able to drop a good deal of wind resistance (but it was still pretty dreadful riding).<\/p>\n

I made it out to Saskatchewan, and while Alberta had a welcome sign right on the highway (going the other way)<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Saskatchewan’s only (admittedly huge, and kinda visible from the highway) sign was tucked away in a rest area at the side of the road, which I didn’t bother to photograph, having expected that there’d still be something on the road itself.<\/p>\n

I generally continued on in conditions roughly resembling this<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

having planned to make a significant human settlement by night, and not packed supplies for dinner.<\/p>\n

Generally speaking, my plans-assuming-tailwinds for crossing the prairies had me reaching populations centres (and ones with WSL hosts at that) frequently enough that I was concerned that any tomatoes I would pack in Lethbridge or the Hat would spoil before I’d get much of a chance to eat them. With the difficulty I was experiencing reaching Maple Creek, I decided that I’d best be sure to have a couple of cans of baked beans with me for the rest of the prairies so I could avoid such a slog in the future, if necessary.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, I made it in to Maple Creek a good half hour or so before the restaurant that I got to (the first one you see when entering town) closed, and was able to eat before riding into town to find a place to camp (again, I ended up setting up behind a church).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bikely map Dreading the forecast weather, and having put away a reasonably long day the day before, I slept in a little, ate a hefty breakfast, procrastinated with weather reports, and got a late start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ab","category-sk","category-ridingdays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}