For My Great Aunt Margaret

How cool is it that my great-aunt not only reads my blog, she checks out our Flickr account? Hi Auntie! I took these pictures just for you.

The General Store in Irricana.

Big Sky on the outskirts of Irricana.

My great-grandparents were some of the original settlers in Irricana. In fact, Kieran and I stopped by the park, where my great-grandpa had helped to plant the trees. It was a pretty cool moment.

I really just...

I just don't KNOW what this means.

A cryptic message about recycling?

Alberta in a Nutshell

Our first stop after BC was in Pincher Creek, which happens to be one of my favourite spots. The view changes every time you look up. This was the night the freaky weather hit BC, causing everyone to worry about us. In fact, had we been a day behind schedule, we would have been hit with those storms. Instead, we got to watch the clouds and lightning engulf the mountains from our vantage point in the east. The wind was so strong in Pincher Creek that night we actually saw the windows of the restaurant warping and bending inwards and then springing back.

Our next stop was in Nanton, a tiny town just south of Calgary. Nanton turned out to be another pleasant surprise, with lovely little cafes, tea houses, and antique shops.

We wandered up to the local tavern, which doesn't appear to have been redecorated in the last 100 years. The walls were decorated with antique guns and animal skins, including a buffalo hide, and all manner of ancient farming equipment, including an old leather yolk for oxen. I wanted to take more pictures, but felt a little sheepish in front of the locals ("Oh, hi! Your little tavern is just so QUAINT! Can you BELIEVE how QUAINT everything is? Pose there by the deer head, will you? Now act QUAINT!")

I did sneak in a picture of one of the pieces of lobby furniture, which was made from old whiskey(?) barrels and upholstered with patched buffalo hide. There was also a matching chair and footstool to this piece, but I did, indeed, catch a glare from the locals when I snapped this shot.

And then we were off to Calgary! The ride into Calgary was something of an unmitigated disaster with a flat tire (mine) and a fainting spell (Kieran's)* and our stress was compounded by the fact that we had friends waiting for us. But we finally got there and we enjoyed a couple of nights of sleeping in a real bed and eating great food and getting tipsy and giggling until the wee hours of the morning. Thanks to my Karla Bean and Jonny P. for their amazing hospitality and, as always, for their friendship!

Unfortunately, I didn't take a single picture in Calgary. I guess I've been there so many times, it just didn't occur to me. You would think I would at least think to get a picture of the four of us together at some point. But no.

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*Yes. Kieran fainted. On the C-Train. FAINTED ON THE C-TRAIN. I didn't realize because he was still standing. With his eyes open. So I got OFF the C-Train. And then had to force the doors back open to figure out what was wrong with Kieran that he was just looking at me blankly and not getting off with me. And then I had to pull the emergency stop button and get the driver to stop the train and the only person who would help me was a teenage boy while all the adults just stared and one person even got all snotty and mean to me. But anyway, the fainting. It was reeeaaaaaalllly stuffy on the train and Kieran was hungry. Kieran came to and me and the kid ushered him off and he ate a banana and had some water and then he was fine and we got back on the next train.

The World's Largest Truck

Yup! Our final stop in BC was to the World's Largest Truck! 700 gallons of diesel per working hour.

Oh, Hummer drivers. How can you sleep at night knowing your ridiculous lifestyle choices could be this much more wasteful and damaging to the environment? Don't worry. I'm sure if the oil executives have their way, it's just a matter of time until you'll be able to taxi a commercial jet for your daily commute to work.

And can you believe there was a head-in-the-hole picture opportunity here and we FORGOT?!? We got too wrapped up in buying an Alberta map.

The Food Crisis

A number of people have asked us what we eat (and how much do you need to eat) while we're biking. Our strategy on this front was pretty basic: We'll eat food. When we're hungry. No fancy protein shakes or whey powder concoctions or energy gels or goos. Largely because those things are, well, gross. They taste gross and they're highly processed and usually packed with sugar and salt. And while I like sugar and salt and will happily eat copious amounts of either, it must be be presented to me in a way that is palatable before I'm willing to belly up. And since we're not competing in a race and have no schedule to adhere to and, therefore, have no need to gulp down something that will rapidly metabolize while we're still madly pedalling, we figured we'd be better off just to eat, you know, food when we're hungry,

We obviously can't carry around a raw roasting chicken and a five pound bag of Yukon Golds, but we can carry some fresh fruit and nuts and good old sesame snaps (that do just as good of a job as Power Bars, only without all the fake processed crap). And, hey, bread weighs, like, nothing. So that's good. And then when we're done for the day, we hit the local grocery store and do up a fresh meal. Simple and healthy, right?

This strategy worked beautifully and got us to Calgary in good spirits. In fact, we had some awesome meals made with fresh local food (fresh asparagus picked THAT DAY seared in butter with grilled salmon steaks vs. whey protein powder--hmmm). I mean, fresh air, sunshine, exercise, and good fresh food. Yeah. We felt good.

And then we headed deep into the heart of the prairie. These towns, they're SMALL, people. And they're remote. I mean, I was born and raised in a small prairie town and even I couldn't get over how small and in the middle of nowhere these places were. Many of these towns don't really have a proper grocery store and the produce is just...sad. Freckled bananas, some apples, and some wrinkled up oranges. And that's about it. (I also noted that a lot of people have gardens, in case you're wondering how they get by.) So it's slim pickin's at the confectioneries and to make matters worse, it's even slimmer pickin's at the local restaurants. These places, the food is just...bad. I'm not entirely sure it technically qualifies as food. Meats that come in gelatinous loafs. (As far as I'm concerned, meat should never shimmy.) Or meats that have an unnatural iridescent sheen. And other things-- anything--that comes breaded and frozen and can be dropped into a deep fryer. Salads are very rarely an option and even more rarely an appetizing one.

Unable to stomach the "meats" in their most unnatural incarnations, we went on a flapjack bender. There's very little you can do to mess up or overprocess a pancake. For a while, it was fun. There's something rather homey and comforting about melting butter on a stack of pancakes that mingles with a sort of childish delight at getting to pour syrup on your meal.

And then after about a week on the Flapjack Diet, I started to feel funny. Sluggish. Tired. Not so great. My skin started to do that thing where it's dry yet breaking out.

After another week where a serving of fruits or vegetables in a day was a triumph, I started to feel downright sad. Nothing was fun anymore. Nothing. Biking was hard. Camping was hard. (There were other things at play, like the headwinds that have dogged us and a general lack of sleep, so I suppose it was something of a perfect storm--malnutrition meets extra demands on body.) Getting up and doing it all over again and again and again was hard. I didn't want to quit, but I also didn't want to go on.

The day we were heading into Regina (also the day we found the injured duck, so, you know, generally a shite day), I realized how far things had gotten when I lost three hours. I simply couldn't believe we'd gone 75 km because I'd been so absorbed in daydreaming about vegetables. I'm not kidding. First, I planted an imaginary vegetable garden, carefully selecting imaginary plants (well, you have to have peas, and carrots, and Oh! beets! don't forget the beets!). Then I made an imaginary vegetable stock with my imaginary vegetables, lingering over images of coarsely chopped celery and carrots and bunches of fresh herbs. I then used my imaginary broth to make a variety of imaginary soups including, and not limited to, Ukranian style borscht with fresh dill, curried spinach and potato soup, and a chilled pea soup with a hint of mint. I even paired each of my imaginary soups with imaginary salads.

While I've had the occasional chocolate craving that's run amok in my day, I've simply never obsessed about food. And certainly never about vegetables! Vegetables!!

It was a sign and I knew it was a sign. Obsessing about food in disturbingly thorough and precise detail is, in fact, a VERY CLEAR SIGN that your vitamin deficiency is STARTING TO AFFECT YOUR MENTAL HEALTH.

So Regina couldn't have come at a better time. We actually went to the buffet at the Hotel Saskatchewan* so we could not only eat a variety of salads, we could eat multiple helpings of those salads. Washed down with platefuls of fruit. I then went back to the hostel and ate a bag of cherries, which was utterly fantastic, despite the predictable results of having consumed intense amounts of fibre in one sitting.

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*If you want to get your money's worth out of a $14 buffet, I suggest going for a 120 km bike ride into a headwind first. You'll be amazed.

A Mighty Headwind

Yeaaaahh. So Saskatchewan didn't exactly go well. Considering we thought that it would take us about four days to get to Manitoba and it actually took us ten. What happened? I'll tell you what happened. WIND happened.

We just couldn't catch a break. Whether we were biking north, south, southeast or east, we were biking straight into a powerful headwind.

In fact, our headwind woes started much earlier than Saskatchewan and, without exaggeration, I can say that save for about two days of riding, we've either been in a headwind or a nasty crosswind since Fernie. In other words, for about 1000 clicks.

So, it's not that the headwinds were isolated to Saskatchewan, it's just that the headwinds culminated into a distinct source of misery and despair in Saskatchewan.

The trouble with a headwind, obviously, is that it slows you down. A lot. Those panniers sticking out from the sides of your bike? You might as well be trailing a parachute behind you. You know, like those race cars that release a parachute to act as a brake. So, yes, it's like riding with your brakes on. And it's hard to really get anywhere when you've got the brakes on. It's, like, slow.

Take, for example the one day in Saskatchewan when we weren't contending with headwinds: We went 160 km from Kindersley to Outlook in about seven hours. A long day, yes, but it was also a very productive day. On the other hand, when we were fighting vicious headwinds between Glenavon to Wawota we were able to do 103 km also in about seven hours.

It's painful. Not just painfully slow. Literally painful. Those 103 km were damn exhausting. Worse than the mountains, because while the passes were a hard few hours, there was also the hour or two where you got to come down the other side. Riding into a headwind for seven hours is just seven hours of unrelenting grunt work. (And it's curiously hard on the knees too, although I don't know why. You just suddenly start to feel rather arthritic and you get all freaked out that you're developing a knee problem, but then it goes away as soon as the wind dies down.)

So, needless to say, the headwind situation was already wearing thin by the time we hit the Saskatchewan border (especially since it robbed us of the Tyrrell Museum!). And, at the same time, the food crisis was developing from a situation into a full blown crisis. Combined with the fact that, after the mountains, one not only expects but needs the prairies to be a bit of a break and lo, we had a morale problem brewing. A morale problem and a corresponding fatigue problem that, given equal portions of poor nutrition and grunt work, boiled over into a just being physically ill problem.

While there were certainly lovely days and lovely moments, the synergy between the Food Crisis and the Headwinds Crisis amounted to what seemed like a drawn out Groundhog Day where we'd get up, grimly soldier through a plateful of processed foods, grunt out a day of riding with both our knees and the wind howling (all the while sliding into a malnourished fugue state), give up after seven hours and realize with alarm and despair that you are nowhere near where you should be if you're going to get out of the province anytime within a reasonable schedule. Repeat.

And, just like all things do when they're spiralling out of control*, one bad situation feeds the other and the longer we were stranded in rural Saskatchewan in the wind, the more we desperately needed quality food and the longer we went without eating properly, the harder it was to ride far enough to get out quicker. And, inevitably, we got kinda ill and we were forced to take an extra day and a half off.

Anyway, it got to the point where at least once a day, Kieran would say with grim determination, "We can't let Saskatchewan win." And I would imagine that, after we left whichever teeny village we'd stopped in, the townspeople would gather around a cauldron in the town square and start chanting some spell that turned the winds from west to east, until eventually we'd be forced to relent and buy real estate and round out the workforce.**

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* Did anyone else have to do those Daisyworld computer simulations in university? Where if you didn't find the perfect balance of daisies and soil, Daisyworld's positive feedback loops would cause its climate to overheat?

**Seriously, some of these places had that kind of creepy feel to them. Made me think of that short story, The Lottery, where the people would stone to death someone every year in order to ensure good crops. Not to mention how the people would descend upon us to tell us how they're trying to attract young families and would bleat things like "The water here is excellent!"

Hey Yous!

Yup! We're in Saskatchewan! Where people actually say "yous." (And where, as you may have guessed there's simply no Internet cafes. In fact, I'm typing this on our fancy phone. Which is kinda hard, so this'll be on the shorter side.) Anyway people say "yous" and it's folksy and friendly, which kinda sums up what our week's been like.

I've been dying to post about our visit in Calgary and the trip to Drumheller that wasn't and the related issue of headwinds that have slowed us down in a serious, alarming way. Oh and we spent the night in an old one room school house that was haunted (even Kieran concedes that now) and visited my parents and stayed in a non-haunted old Eatons catalogue house.

But at the moment, it's all overshadowed by something that happened yesterday. We found a duck who had just been hit by a truck. She was stunned and sitting in the shoulder, unable to move. One of her eyes was filled with blood and her bill was cracked and bleeding and she just looked at us helplessly when we approached. It was heartbreaking to see. We put our bikes down and Kieran picked her up and carried her as gently as possible to where there were some reeds and a small pond. She was so stunned she didn't even struggle at all. We just wanted to get her off the side of the road so could be in the shade and away from all the traffic. She stood up on her own once she was in the reeds, but she was too dizzy to walk yet. We decided to just leave her in peace so that we wouldn't cause her any more stress. I really don't know if she could have survived. Her wings were fine but she obviously had a head injury. It made us both deeply heartsick, all the more so because we've been so delighted by all the ducks and ducklings we've seen on the trip.

Okay. That's all for now. We're off to catch a play at the Regina Fringe Festival. Let's hope the rest of the nation is slightly better conected than the bald prairie.