June 22^nd: Ottawa to Sudbury – 570km

I was not at my best in the morning and I had to pick up my bike which was 10km away. I decided to get back to running and ran up there taking the same path I have been training on when I was training for Ironman. Ottawa is an amazing city for active people. I then showered and packed up my stuff to be ready around 2pm. Martin is part of the High Waters music group and that’s what he signed on my map.

I grabbed some fruits, hummus and pitas at the grocery store and had lunch before leaving towards Sudbury. It was a warm sunny day and the road was easy. I passed Sudbury around 8pm and set camp an hour later behind an ice rink somewhere.

 

June 23^rd: Sudbury to Wawa – 460km

I left early in the morning and crossed path with another traveler. Charles was from England and was travelling towards Calgary on his KTM 690. He followed me for lunch as I was meeting with Nate. So I arrived in Sault-Ste-Marie about 15 minutes before noon and Nate was on his way. We met for the first time a few minutes later and I was happy with first impressions. He seemed like a cool guy just like on Skype. We left and drove along Lake Superior and saw a few interesting landscapes. When we arrived in Wawa, Charles went on his own to find a hotel as we were camping.

 

June 24^th: Wawa to Thunder Bay – 700km

We left early in the morning towards Thunder Bay. It was about 15 degrees C and somewhat sunny as we checked out. I decided to wear only the minimum as I thought it would be mostly warm during the day. Not 30 minutes into the ride, we had to stop and change as it started raining and temperature dropped drastically to 5 degrees C. We got soaked all day and temperature did not go up. We stopped for about 2 hours in a restaurant for lunch and had a few cup of hot water there to warm up. Our next stop was Thunder Bay and there we had a personalized stir fry. We then drove on for another couple hours before stopping in a hotel in the middle of nowhere. We had a good night of sleep there.

 

June 25^th:   Thunder Bay, ON to Winnipeg, MA – 475km

We headed towards Kenora for lunch. It is a cool town when driving on the main street.  Manitoba border was very close at this point and we crossed it about an hour later. We had been riding in the forest going up and down, left and right for more than two days at that point. When crossing that border, everything went flat and strait. We had to go through another hour of forest before we saw the prairies for the first time. We stopped in Winnipeg to grab something to eat,  take a few pictures and drove through the Forks before we headed to the closest campground out of the city.

 

June 26^th: Winnipeg, MA to Reed Lake, SK – 755km

That day is very easy to summarize: fields. Even though we rode for most of the day, none of us felt exhausted: roads are very well maintained and completely strait; you see farther than your eyes can perceive and it was a sunny day. We went around Regina and stopped for dinner in Moose Jaw. Chatting with our server, we learned to the city was built over a network of tunnels built by Al Capone and his gang back in the days. We decided to keep going and ended up in a small town called Morse next to Reed lake. We played Frisbee for a while. Then there was a beautiful rainbow out when I came back from showering.