July 20 - Day 26
Portage la Prairie
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I need to stop having good days followed by bad ones. Today was not a bad one other than lots of bad luck following one after the other. Let's see, it starts right at the crack of dawn when I forgot to turn my cell phone off the previous night and it starts ringing. I was already waking up but when you are in a tent, there are other people near you that can hear everything, especially after a quiet night when hearing seems to be more acute. I had to make a couple of apologies and to anyone that I missed, sorry. I should have turned the phone off. Next up, about 3-4 kms out of camp, I notice that the ride is a little hard and low and behold, I am not wearing my gloves. I had set them on my trunk when going to the bathroom and they must have fallen off and I was not going to cycle that distance back into the headwind. It was time to buy new gloves anyways so no big loss except for the lack of protection on my hand from vibration and spills. A little more on that later. I did accomplish one thing I set out to do after a little while. I still seemed to have some of that extra energy from yesterday so after climbing out of town, the only hill we really had today, I decided to see if I could get the average speed up over 30km/hr. This was at 30 minutes into the ride and a current average of 22km/hr meant that I would have to try and maintain 40km/hr for the next half hour. There was 20km/hr tailwind at this point so I started this quest and at the one hour mark had done 30.4 kms so accomplished that goal. It was after this, while looking for a place to eat the sub I had picked up, that as I was turning into a rest area at the 50km point, the front tire hit a soft patch of dirt and gravel while turning and it came to a stop and I went over sideways at about 10-15km/hr and hit the dirt on my right side. When I had my spill during training and scraped my left elbow raw, I said to my daughter, "Why couldn't it be the right one so I could at least get rid of the wart." Be careful what you wish for, that wart is now gone as well as some extra skin on the rest of my forearm, lower leg and a nice gash in my hand as well from the missing gloves. At least there were outhouses here with TP and I had my extra H2O bottle on the bike so I was able to give it a good cleaning, dirt was just imbedded everywhere. My arm would have been a lot worse but I had not taken my arm warmers off yet and believe it or not, except for some, blood they are still in good condition. Now I had to get a little inventive because I could not hold onto the bar with my right hand like this. By now it was warm enough so I took my arm warmers and wrapped them around the bar to provide extra padding and that did the trick for the day. I did miss Bud's intended turn to keep us off the #1 but it is just as well from what I heard. I only had to travel about 2-3 kms of the #1 on the shoulder as there was a side road right along the highway that got me very close to the city. In general the ride was tiring from the point of narrow paved to broken shoulders for most of the route with some crosswinds coming across the busy highway creating big eddies behind passing and oncoming trucks. My spill and the over cautious riding after it along these roads meant I was not looking for picture opportunities and only took one a kilometer from camp when I saw this nice scenic fountain. Also had to deal with mosquito swarms both where I took the spill and tonight here in camp. Even with all this, pschologically it was not a bad day and my mood is pretty good considering.
The fountain.
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