Manitoba

Day 16: 154 km. It rained quite heavily during the night. Mr. Iik had been wondering if his single wall tent is capable of sustaining such a prolonged downpour. Well now he knows: it is, with a little leaking. However, there was a major damage: his camera got wet and all the function buttons except the trigger are now dead! Last night he made a mistake: he put the handlebar bag the camera was in into a stuff bag which he leaned against the tent side wall. The stuff bag got wet from the water running down the tent side and apparently the handlebar bag was lying in a pool of water the whole night. He still can shoot, only with wide angle and no focusing and he can review only the last shot.
Other than that the ride went smoothly, the wind again mostly in his back. He stopped at the Manitoba border, where he got a free road map of the province and information about the location of bicycle stores in Brandon. In Brandon he got a new, sexy looking tyre.

Day 17: 227 km. Before the start that morning Iik changed the tyres. He threw away the worn front tyre, put the rear tyre to the front (where it had been in the first place) and the new tyre on the rear wheel.

Drying in a motel room.

The roads in Manitoba are supposedly dangerous because they are lacking the paved shoulder. But these sections of shoulder-less road are not dominant, there were about 70 km of such sections altogether from the Saskatchewan border to Winnipeg. Trans-Canada #1 in Manitoba has divided roadways for each direction of travel and two lanes in each direction, so there is enough room for trucks and cars to pass. We will see that the roads in Ontario are much worse. Mr. Iik found that the rear view mirror is excellent help in such critical situations when you are not sure how close the traffic behind you will pass and at the same time you have to scan the road ahead to make sure you don't ride into gravel.

The tyvec suit.

Day 18: 105 km. Grey, cloudy morning, as countless mornings so far. The weather forecasts optimistically predict improvement in two days, and the next day the forecast is the same. So he is always two days behind the good weather. As many days before Mr. Iik rode on the front edge between dry weather and grey stormy clouds. Sometimes he managed to avoid the rain, sometimes, as today, not. The rain catches him in Sandiland Provincial park, firstly as a drizzle, then a real hard rain. He again changes rain gear from rain jacket and pants to tyvec suit, yet nothing seems to work well. He retreats early into a motel just a kilometer or two after Hadashville.