total km:
We finally gathered up the courage to leave Winnipeg. It was a sad departure. The ride to Prawda was pretty basic, save for a few interesting highlights. The grandest of which was our lunch stop.
We managed to find a shady oasis underneath a highway overpass that also got us away the whirl of traffic. Evidently it was a popular pit stop as we read the stories of many hitchhikers and cyclists written in chalk on the back side of a concrete support. Making it the grandest highlight was the fact that we ran into the Kiwi, Reuban, whom we had not seen since Castelgar in B.C., before which we had run into each other quite regularly. This was a pleasant surprise indeed. We made plans to meet up at the campground in Prawda, Reuban took off to find lunch, and we finished ours. Our second highlight was:
Our third highlight was watching the rapid change in vegetation. We were clearly out of the prairies by the end of the day. We were no longer able to see the curvature of the earth on the horizon, but were instead viewing stunted pine forests amidst a mosaic of swampy marshes.
The lowlight of the day, however, was that it became ever apparent that we were nearing northern Ontario and its legendary reputation for its mosquito population. Our campsite must have been home to about half of B.C.’s mosquito population. They literally swarmed us. In the time it took to unzip the tent door, dive in and zip it back up mosquitos numbering in the double digits had bombarded our tent. Somehow they even found time to bite us before we hunted them down because every one we got left bloody smears in our palms. We hope that the temporary banning of DEET wasn’t for any legitimate reason as we will be swimming in it all the way to Quebec.
B&K
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