July 31st

Environment Canada is calling for rain today, and the next campground is 120 km down the road. So I may be rough camping tonight depending on how I make out. But there should be a choice of lakes and sites if I need to rough camp.

Light drizzle as I started out, which stopped for a couple of km and then came back as heavy rain for the next 3 hours. I did find the one open restaurant to get some soup and hot food for lunch, and was able to get a dry shirt on for a few minutes. The restaurant was crazy busy, with just one waitress trying to handle 10+ tables and 40+ people. So patience was very much on the agenda (for most of the diners), and I had a lot of questions about my bike and my trip while I waited until I was served. Unfortunately there were two family groups who were quite obnoxious about getting served and fed right away, and whined and moaned themselves to the front of the queue, and then whined and moaned about their orders not being exactly what they expected, and they kept the poor waitress extra busy. (One lady ordered poutine, and then wanted to send it back because her French fries had cheese and gravy on them)

Back on the bike it was dry for maybe 10 km, and then I hit a series of extremely heavy rain showers where the rain was absolutely pounding down. The roads at this point weren’t built with a normal camber, but were sloped to only one side or the other, and there could be a whole lot of water on the road if you were on the down side of these slopes during the heavy rain. Between the rain in your face and the water on the road it was then a wee bit difficult to see any road hazards, and on the whole it wasn’t very pleasant riding.

The showers eventually lightened up a bit, but the ground was so sodden and saturated that there was standing water everywhere, rivers in the drainage ditches, and waterfalls at every rock cut. (Of which there were many)

At about the 80 km mark I was passed by two other cyclists, but we didn’t do much more than say hi as the conditions weren’t exactly conducive for having a roadside chat. They must have then stopped at a picnic area, as they passed me again later, again blasting past me on a hill in the rain. I cruised along behind them slowly catching up on the following downhill, but they rode out of site on the next uphill.

The rain stopped when I reached the 100 km point on my ride, and I was left with the dilemma of stopping now whilst it was “dry” and setting up a rough camp, or riding for another hour to the Campground, but almost certainly being back in the rain again as a result. At that point in the ride I was going past a series of lakes, but while the lakes were inviting, there was no real access to them.

So I basically just kept on riding and hoping to find a place to camp. I saw one spot that I thought might be possible, but then had a Cougar cross the road just in front of me, which kind of ruled that lake out. I finally did find a good place to wild camp a couple of km later, where there was an piece of the old highway 17 alignment that had been replaced by new highway, but which offer me a decent well drained gravel surface and reasonably open terrain. I was probably still in that Cougar’s territory, but it had been traveling south and I north, and the open ground isn’t the preferred hunting terrain for them; they are ambush predators.

I got into dry clothes and got the tent and tarp up before the rain started up again, and then kludged up a supper in the tent while the rain and wind fought each other outside. I raced outside briefly in one drier spell to deal with my bike and trailer and food, but once that was dealt with dove back into the tent and crashed for the night. 110 km in the rain was good enough for me for the day.