Day 27: Another delicious breakfast with so many homemade jams! I've never known the joys of having multiple jam options. It has been wonderful staying with Peter and Anna; I loved hearing their family stories and some of the history of the Mennonites in Manitoba. This morning we ride beyond Winnipeg, but we will bring something of our experience with Peter and Anna along with us. That's right: homemade oatmeal cookies! Oh! They are so good! I am thoroughly impressed that we made them last for more than a day.

The ride from one side of the perimeter highway to the other was two or three hours of heavy traffic and construction. Not exactly ideal, but that's only because we're not knowledgeable of the Winnipeg cycling paths, which I hear are very good. We also stopped at a bike shop because Ian noticed his back tire had a few bulges in it -- probably the unhappy result of loading all his weight on the back. We can't be sure of what might have happened, but we imagined some terrifying tire explosion whilst trucks hurled themselves at us, and so Ian got his tire changed. The owner of the shop gave us some advice on routes, and when we mentioned that we were heading over to the library to try to set up a host in Brandon, he offered to let us use his internet! One warm showers email and a few minutes later, we began navigating the crazy Winnipeg streets. Once we left the city and found Highway 2, we cycled in warm sun on a country road with farms everywhere, and we felt happy. We felt like we had finally found the prairies.

And in finding the prairies, we also found the prairie wind. Today it was a crosswind, which we discovered can make us as slow going as a headwind (though it's less infuriating). After totalling 92km, we figured we didn't need to go any further, if we give ourselves 3 days to reach Brandon (2 would have been very tough!). Now picture, for yourself, trying to find a place to camp in the prairies. Every farm looks soft and inviting, but of course you can't camp in a middle of a farm. Nor can you camp in the ditch beside the highway. You need forest. Any forest that we found also came with a house. Eventually we gave up hopes of finding a good spot, and decided to just ask the nearest home owners if we could camp in their yard. But the nearest house had no owners! It was locked, and barren. I presume it had just been sold and the new owners had not yet moved in. It felt strange, but after a few hours we felt more comfortable, like we would be alone, and we had a great comfortable sleep.

Day 28: The day of the headwind. Fortunately, yesterday's crosswind numbed my mind to the spit of the wind, so after a few hours today I found myself in a mental state capable of riding into the wind and not much noticing the sting or the slowness of the passing terrain. And I'm still alert in traffic, so that's good!

We still haven't been able to draft from slow moving vehicles for a long distance, yet. Today an entire house passed by us, carried on a huge flatbed truck;, after ducking and ditching onto the dirt shoulder, we couldn't catch back up to the house, which was probably flying about 40km/h. It would have been very sweet to have drafted from a house.

In Holland we stopped and ate lunch, and treated ourselves to ice cream. This is always a bad tasty idea. We felt very bloated when we got back on our bikes, but we rode it out, until we had to stop to finish the remaining ice cream that was melting, and felt bloated again. But we rode it out. In Glenboro we found out that our Warm Showers Brandon host is unavailable, so we sent out some Couch Surfing requests. We then cheerily rode north on Hwy 5, a much nicer road and out of the wind, to Spruce Woods Provincial Park. This would be the first night with bad mosquitos: pretty good for camping all this time in Ontario and Manitoba! The all-natural mosquito repellent I got at MEC works pretty well, and smells kind of nice to boot!

Day 29: A day of many things. We woke early, packed, and rode to the nearby Spirit Sands, Manitoba's only "desert". It's not a true desert, for it gets too much rainfall, but there is a large area of sand dunes. It's a fragile ecosystem of sparse grasses, some cactuses, and some unique animals such as the Northern Prairie Skink, Manitoba's only lizard. I found beauty in the wave-like hills scattered with thin vegetation barely holding them in place. The Spirit Sands had long been a spiritual place to the Natives; it was a place where no violence was allowed, where Natives would learn spiritual lessons from the ecosystem. This was the most wonderful Manitoba landscape I've seen so far, and though very different from Ontario's landscape, it amazed me just as much.

The rest of the day would not be as nice. A bumpy ride to Carberry brought us to the library where we checked eagerly for updates on a Brandon host. No luck so far. Rain patches circled around us for the rest of the day as we rode west towards Brandon, doing our best to stay off the Trans-Canada and to ignore the constant headwind. On Road 457, a wicked storm cloud hit us, with rain so huge and wind so strong that when they hit me it felt like hail. Or maybe it was hail. I wouldn't put it past that cloud. We hid under a tree for 15 minutes until it past. One thing to remember in the prairies is that storms don't seem to last very long, so taking brief cover is worth it! After cycling for a long time into the wind at a depressingly slow 16km/h, we made it to Brandon. We found that an entire street was taken up for a few blocks by old cars and trucks, probably all souped up, and people sitting in lawn chairs and smoking and chatting about cars. Not exactly my favourite topic, but it was nice to see so many people enjoying themselves in their own way. After much searching, we found a restaurant that was open past 6pm. After checking for hosts again and discovering that we would be camping, we set out to find a spot, hopefully not too far from the city. Indeed, we did the sketchy thing and camped in a city park, actually just on the recently flooded land by the Assiniboine River. Since it wasn't a Friday or Saturday night I wasn't too concerned about drunk teenagers, and we slept the night in privacy. Yay!