- Day 1 -1 Week
- Day 1 -12 Hours
- Day 1
- Day 2
- Day 3
- Day 4
- Day 5
- Day 6
- Day 7
- Day 8
- Day 9
- Day 10
- Day 11
- Day 12
- Day 13
- Day 14
- Day 15
- Day 16
- Day 17
- Day 18
- Day 19
- Day 20
- Day 21
- Day 22
- Day 23
- Day 24
- Day 25
- Day 26
- Day 27
- Day 28
- Day 29
- Day 30
- Day 31
- Day 32
- Day 33
- Day 34
- Day 35
- Day 36
- Day 37
- Day 38
- Day 39
- Day 40
- Day 41
- Day 42
- Day 43
- Day 44
- Day 45
- Day 46
- Day 47
- Day 48
- Day 49
- Day 50
- Day 51
- Day 52
- Day 53
- Day 54
- Day 55
- The End
- Retrospective
Our motel was really a few attached apartments rented by the night, week, I’m sure they would have rented on by the year… if you wanted to stay in Chaplin for a year. It was nice to have two separate rooms, with separate TV’s. I flipped around the 15 channels for a minute before going to sleep. As soon as I turned off the the TV the skies opened up, lightning, thunder, rain and wind. It was impressive. Also amazing that two days in a row we had fine weather and shortly after going to bed a storm came. Could we be lucky enough to only get night time storms? Here’s hoping.
No breakfast options in town so we headed down the road to see what we could find.
There were large lakes on either side of the road, lined with white… We both assumed this was salt, it was too warm for snow or ice, no matter what happened in last nights storm. But were these salt lakes? Again I feel out of touch with the way the world works. I know there is the salt lakes in Utah, and the Dead Sea are in land… but here, in the north end of the middle on North America? I guess there could be salt any where, I just didn’t think I’d be riding next to one in Canada.
33 days on the road is a lot. Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s the cyclical nature of bike riding, and like your feet your mind goes round and round. Some small thing that was said, some little things done. You think about it, it goes away, it comes back, and goes away and comes back again. Too much sun? Too much time for two straight men to be together 24/ 33? Never ending leg workout? Whatever… We needed a talk. We had a talk, and then we were better. I’m not trying to be cagy about it, but in the end were friends and don’t actually want to upset / hurt / annoy each other. I could go on and on about what he said or what I did or when this happened or that didn’t happen. Would any of it really mean anything to those who weren’t there? Who weren’t peddling all day in the elements? Who don’t know why this might bother one of us while that bothers the other.
Of course this entire working it out happened over breakfast, where we could be face to face and not have the wind make half the conversation un-hearable. Our waitstaff were Chinese immigrants who were more then happy to chat with us about Canada, China, and the States. Which made our conversation both easier and harder. Having a distraction during a tense moment, and having to not say exactly what we might have wanted to the that exact moment because they are standing there staring at us with a smile.
After a good breakfast we were back on the road, already at the halfway point. The road went back and fourth with ok to bumpy. We talked about how this happens… I mean do they say ok, ‘we’re gonna fix half the road.’ There wasn’t any county lines or obvious town lines where these repairs stopped or started. How do they judge where to make these road repairs? There was a long stretch of road with two lines of brand new black top on either side of the right lane, basically where the tires would go… They only fixed the part where the tires might go?!?
We rode across the prairie talking about it’s vastness. It feels overwhelming. Is that hill a mile, two miles… it could be fifteen miles away. It’s hard to imagine trekking across the seemingly endless landscape not really knowing how far it might be. I can look at my phone, or even a map and know exactly how far till we can get to a place.
We closed in on our destination, another lighter day but it is what it is. Again, no matter what we might want to do, we can only go to where there are hotels, when restaurants are still open. Unless we were having a much different tour.
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