Day 30: We woke up in the same park we went to sleep in, and after packing up, headed over to the big box-mall to get some groceries. We ate our cereal in the warm, warm lobby of the Safeway. Geoff also bought a USB stick from the Future Shop so that we can start carrying two copies of all of our photos, just in case.

By this time I was pretty sick of Brandon. It was an aweful mess to get to, and nothing particularly rewarding when we got there, except a bunch of cars. We decided to head north to take the Yellowhead highway, hoping to avoid the traffic on the Trans-Canada. This turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. The curse didn't last that long, but it was bad enough. The highway we were taking was completely terrible (highway 10). It was two lanes with no real shoulder, and the asphault at the side of the road was completely chewed up. Being behind Geoff, I didn't have a clear view of what the road conditions were going to be like in a few metres, so I was struggling to avoid the big pot holes. The rest of my time was spent looking in my mirror and turning my neck, checking to see what was coming up. Truck after truck after truck. We have a couple of code words, one of which is "Bail!", which we have thankfully never had to use. I remember yelling to Geoff "Aaaah!! I'm so sick of Manitoba". I think we saw about 15km of highway with paved shoulder in that whole province. Eventually, after about 12km of putting up with this, a big red pickup went by, and just in front of us, let out a big cloud of thick black gas. I don't know what it was, but it seems like he did it intentionally. We couldn't see, so we pulled over onto the gravel to wait for it to pass. Geoff asked me if we should try hitch-hiking. I think it had been on both of our minds, and I immediately voiced my favour. We stuck up our thumbs.

Now neither of us has ever hitch-hiked before, but it seems to me that we had pretty good luck. In less then five minutes a blue pickup truck signaled and pulled over. We ran up and he told us to throw our bikes in the back. They're a bit to heavy to throw, but we managed to lift them in eventually. His name was Tom and he was coming home early from work, back to his home town, Minnedosa. Not only was his timing right, but he had an expertise I can't thank him enough for. He was a truck-driving instructor who had driven all over Canada. He knew, off the top of his head, the conditions of every highway in western Canada. He could tell us about the number of lanes, the traffic levels, and even the shoulder size of any highway we thought would be on our route. He was also a very strange guy, but very friendly. He joked about a handful of places along the way where we could pick up some ladies. He also joked about the gin in his water bottle. It was opaque, and I hope he was joking. I wish I remembered some of the other quirky things he said. He invited us to his house, on our way back from the west coast, to go to a house concert he would be having with some local bands. He also planned our route into Saskatoon, which turned out to be a very ideal route. He also ended up driving us 56km out of his way, to the entrance of Riding Mountain National Park. He advised us to avoid the Yellowhead in Manitoba, and instead take highway 5.

And so our cheating ended, and I don't regret it one bit. Tom saved our necks and gave us a great route. The ride through the national park was spectacular. Beautiful forests. We also saw our first bears. A while after lunch, across the road, we saw a mother bear with her three small cubs. One of the cubs was trying to climb a tree, and was very cute with his arms and legs fully outstretched. Just past the park, we stopped to see a Ukrainian-Canadian memorial, thanking the Canadian-Ukrainians for their contributions to the country over the years. Geoff is part Ukrainian, and I think he had a few distant relatives in the region. Just up the road was the town of Dauphin, which I later found out, was the birth place of my grandfather. We got some groceries there, and being excited about the wind coming from the East, we trucked on for a while before finding a cozy place next to a farmers field to cook our perogies. We had covered a lot of distance, about 205km including our lift.

Day 31 was a speedy day. We had either no wind or a tail wind the whole day, and so we spent much of our time up around 30km/h. The road was wonderful. There were very few cars on highway 5, just one now and then. On one of our stints, we did about 50km without touching our shoes to the ground. In fact, on this day, we only got off our bikes four times before stopping for good. We had a feast of a lunch (ie. not just peanut butter and jam) on the bank of a pretty river. It was overcast the whole day, but I didn't mind, because I think it was correlated to the tail-wind.

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At about 95km, we hit our second border: Saskatchewan! Tom had pointed out to us on our ride that Saskatchewan was easy to draw, but hard to spell. Geoff has always thought the opposite: it is spelled as it sounds, and up close, the border is very jagged. We went on for a while more, and again found a place next to a field with some trees to cozy into and cook some supper. We had our first experience of not having enough water, but we pulled through.

However, on the morning of day 32, we were right out of water, and so didn't have anything to eat our cereal with (we use milk powder). We ate a couple of granola bars and headed for the closest town. It turned out that the closest two towns, Dunleath and Tonkin, were devoid of everything except a few houses. So we gave up on cereal and ate some peanut butter and jam. I wasn't parched or anything, but a glass of water would have been appreciated. We found some water in the large town of Yorkton, after 42km. We only saw the the outskirts, which was just the usual urban sprawl and box-stores. Still on Tom's route, we turned north onto the 9 for another smooth ride, which turned our tail wind into a cross wind. I almost prefer head-winds to cross winds. Geoff's theory is that a cross-wind gets chewed up by the spokes, and since our bikes are fitted with more spokes then ordinary, it is all the worse. But we turned west onto Saskatchewan's highway 5 soon enough to resume the fast speeds we had been getting used to, between 30km/h and 37km/h.

We had been warned many times that the ride through the prairies would be tedious and boring. I didn't find this to be the case at all. The skies and clouds are stunning. There can be so much weather happening at once. To the south it might be blue skied and sunny, and in the north you might see a storm in the distance, and in every other direction something else. Sometimes the fields are a dark, rich brown, or sometimes they are just starting to show their crop coming through the hay. We pitched our tent close to the town of Rama, behind some trees, and cooked our supper. The days are really starting to merge into one another, so it's difficult to remember this one specifically, but in my written-point-form journal, I end the day by saying "The ride today was amazing".