Hello from Thunder Bay, Ontario!

We're in a little Internet gamers' den, which turns out to be not at all conducive to writing because I'm surrounded by teenage boys who are all yelling at each other about who's cheating and you're a cheater and stop cheating you cheater and there's a couple of other kids playing some game that involves learning to play a virtual electric guitar. I'm sure their parents actually PAY them to come here just to get this noise out of the house.

Normally, I have a couple of posts to upload but I've not been writing this week because...WE MADE FRIENDS! Alex and Veronique. Friends who we would hang out with at night and we would talk and they'd say funny things and then we'd say funny things and we'd all laugh and then we'd go to bed and talk about all the funny things our New Friends Alex and Veronique said. We met them at the campground in Ignace when they pulled their bikes into the spot next to ours. They're biking from the Yukon to Quebec.

We have met other bikers on this trip but, uh, they've all been assholes. There seems to be this unspoken element of competition for a lot of people and they ask you questions not because they're interested in you, but because they want to brag about how much faster they are, better their gear choices are, or how clever they are at choosing a superior route. It's always poor Kieran that these dorks will corner while I'm off brushing my teeth somewhere, and either it's against the dorks' Code of Honour for Socially Inept Conversations to try to one-up a female, or a female presence is simply too overwhelming, but my returning to Kieran's side is the only thing that seems to shut these guys up.

Anyway, Our New Friends Alex and Veronique were not like that. They had me at "The headwinds in Saskatchewan were terrible." When they admitted to one day being crushed enough by the wind to give up after thirty kilometres and hitchhike, I all but hugged them. So we had new friends to exchange stories with and compare notes with and to generally hang out with and it's been a long time since we had any company other than our own and I neglected the blog.

So, in lieu of having a proper post, being able to compose a proper post, or having the capacity to upload our pictures to Flickr, I present to you a long overdue map update: