We Heart Manitoba

They say a change is as good as a rest. Indeed. Manitoba, humble little Manitoba, provided us with both.

I don't know that either of us had high expectations for Manitoba. In terms of biking, many of the Web sites we'd read in preparing for our trip spoke poorly of Manitoba as a place to bike. Almost universally, people complained about the roads and the fact that the shoulders aren't paved and about the bugs. And, indeed, the shoulders aren't paved. Anywhere. Even in many parts of Winnipeg. And the bugs! The bugs are something terrible. Whatever your worst bug experience is? It's like that, only worse.

All the same, we found Manitoba to be just lovely. We stuck to the secondary highways and people were respectful and cautious around us and the roads were blessedly quiet and it really didn't matter that we couldn't ride in the shoulder. And the bugs? Well, everything else was so lovely that it's okay that we had to sacrifice large hunks of flesh to their rabid maneating mosquitoes.

The difference between Manitoba and Saskatchewan/Alberta was apparent almost immediately after crossing the border. The towns are older and they have lovely Victorian buildings and parks and majestic old elm trees and oak trees lining the streets. And the campgrounds were equally lovely, many of them built in 1970 for the Manitoba centennial, which means they're all treed in nicely.

And, yes, the food is better. Our first night in Manitoba we stopped in Virden and wandered into a restaurant on Main Street that really didn't look all that promising, just more promising than all the other restaurants. But then, in talking up her turkey special (which I had no intention of getting as I'd once made the mistake of getting a ham special and was served Spam and mashed potatotes made from a powder), the owner leaned in and said, "I'm not like those other places. I use real meat. I bought it from a farmer this morning. And I make my own gravy." Uh, SOLD!

Kieran still talks about that turkey. I mean, you can't go wrong with anything soaked in homemade gravy, but you really can't go wrong with fresh turkey packed between two slabs of bread soaked in homemade gravy. Seriously, peeps, you simply can't revere the true meaning of the phrase "two slabs of bread soaked in homemade gravy" until you bike for eight hours first. Gravy is not food. It's God Goo oozed straight from the heavens into the open pores of your fluffy, fluffy simple carbohydrates..

It is incredible how much better we felt after that meal. That gravy seemed to simply washed away all our troubles. (The next time you're feeling down or demoralized, I would prescribe tucking into some turkey sandwiches soaked in God Goo. It's like a small injection of Prozac.) Turkey endorphins and longlost vitamins coursing through our veins, we both kept remarking, "I LIKE Virden. It's NICE here. Don't you think it's NICE here?" as we rambled about town after our meal.

But the food crisis met its official demise in Winnipeg, thanks to Kieran's Great-aunt Olive. Olive stuffed us with homemade bread dripping in homemade butter, raspberries and beans from the garden, fried chicken, and grilled salmon. It's impossible to maintain any semblance of low morale when you have a sweet aunt who scratches your back every morning while you sip your fresh coffee and wait for your hashbrowns.