June 22 – Virden to Souris

Bike log: 89.6 km, 325m of vertical, avg. speed 19.0 km/h

A weird day, definitely one of the more different ones! Immediately after leaving Virden this morning, the nice paved shoulder that had been there since the border disappeared and became dirt! Not gravel, like a gravel road, but loose packed dirt! Maybe somone was thinking about putting in some potato plants along the highway, I don’t know. Not very fun riding for a bike, and probably not very safe for a car!.

Fortunately, the shoulder on the other side of the highway (Hwy 1 is a divided highway here) was paved and a full lane wide , so I headed over there and rode along. Not too bad, but it too turned to dirt after about 5 km.

I can ride on a gravel road no problem (good tires) albeit a little slower than normal, and fortunately there was a gravel service road running along the highway, so I rode along there. That lasted another 5 km or so, and then ended at some farmer’s house. So I had to carry my bike through a swampy ditch to get over to the highway, and then…rode in the grass alongside the road! This wasn’t a lawn, mind you, this was grass a good 2 feet high. But the roots of the grass gave enough support to the dirt that I could at least ride along. The trick was to stay right at the boundary of the grass and dirt - you get about 2 inches of play either way. Where the grass gave out, I earned my dirt biking skills bonus and powered through the loose dirt. Hard work but I did'nt wipe out!

The reason for ploughing ahead was to get to the next town and head south to Highway 2 since Highway 1 has turned unridable. So eventually after an hour or so of dirt/grass biking we did get to a paved road that took us south. I guess I haven’t mentioned the day's wind up til now – it was a blaster from the south! First south wind on the prairies, I might add. So after an hour or so of battling that (I won’t mention the rain storm or hail that I rode through) we finally got to Highway 2.