Day 19: More rain = hotel

Sacrebleu! The Hampton Inn in Winnipeg does not have the Belgian waffle maker we know and love. We ate breakfast in the lobby all decked out in jeans and motorcycle gear, among all the professionals getting ready for work. It was a great reminder for me that I didn’t have to go to work or put on a suit today!

We headed out of the city, back to the Trans-Canada highway, no longer called the Yellowhead. Oh, tete jaune, I shall miss you. We settled in for another day of flat fields. A couple of hours later, we crossed into Ontario, and the landscape changed almost literally at the border. It was hilly, and lake-y. Ontario is directly north of Minnesota, land of a thousand lakes. Minnesota gots nuthin on Ontario. Take a gander at Google Earth, and Ontario looks like someone spit blue all over it.

All the lakes had signs by the road to tell you their names. Apparently there is no size limit for what constitutes a lake, and frequently, the body of water on one side of a chunk of rock I passed would have a totally different name than the body of water on the other side of a chunk of rock. I had not looked at a map before setting off, so at first I was amused at the simple lake names: Falcon, Hawk, West Hawk, Eagle, Granite, Jenny, Dixie, Patrick. Then I realized this game was going to go on for the entire province, and I stopped categorizing them by animals, first names, last names, and inanimate objects. By far my favorite names were a trio of three lakes: Dad Lake, Mom Lake, and Baby Lake. These people really have more lakes than they can supply with clever names.

I was wrong about not having to put on a suit today. The rain started and we all put on rain suits. The lakes were probably beautiful, but as you get wetter and colder, bodies of water start losing their appeal.

We were trying to make some time, but towns large enough to support a hotel were scarce. We would worry about finding a town with a working gas station before we ran out of gas. We were getting worried about just that around lunchtime when we came up on an old timey motel with a restaurant and a gas pump out front. We filled up the bikes and tried to figure out how far down the road we had to go to find a decent eatery. L had gone inside, and she came back out to say this would be our eatery. There was a sign in the washroom that said something about how this establishment provided you with a clean restroom and maybe you could show your gratitude by purchasing something to help out a struggling business woman. We are all for helping struggling business women, so we ordered pots of hot coffee and bowls of chili. It’s July.

We finished the day at Dryden. We weren’t sure how much farther we would have to go to find another decent town, and once again, K and I insisted on a hotel – a Holiday Inn was handy. All our clothing was soaked. K had a great deal of experience in drying out gear. She went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and they created these drying rooms to take care of their gear each night. She created a drying room in the hotel bathroom with a portable heater and all our soggy gear on hangers. Worked like a charm.

Our night’s entertainment was a trip to Wal-Mart. I was sick of wet feet and was on the search for waterproof boots. I found these Farmer Brown looking things that were rated to -40 degrees F and -40 degrees C. L looked at the tag and said, “This must be a misprint. It can’t be -40 for both.”

“ Actually, it is right,” I said. “Minus 40 is the one temperature where both Fahrenheit and Celsius are the same.”

Stony silence. “Sometimes it is really irritating to travel with a know-it-all engineer,” she replied.

The boots look ridiculous, but I don’t care. I hope they work, and I also hope I don’t have to find out how well they work. I REALLY hope I don’t find out if they are comfortable down to negative 40 C/F.

Daily Recap: 280 miles, Province: Ontario (Dryden) – Holiday Inn