After a really good sleep we hit the road to find the wind was not as strong but the road took us more into it.
The first 20km were painfully slow and my cycle buddies Tom and Randy and I had to work in 2km rotations to take the force of the wind.
However after about 20km the wind seemed to be more of assistance than it had been at the start and we started to make some progress.
Today’s ride was split into 30km lumps which happened to coincide with somewhere to stop and get juice or water.
After 90km we passed into our third province of Saskatchewan. No change in view just another Government.The scenery on the prairies is fairly flat, there are some long rolling hills and the odd kick up for a few hundred meters or so but in general there are huge distances between buildings or towns or, come to think of it, bends!!. The farming changes about every 20km or so varying from cereals to beef but whatever they are farming I imagine its hard work and a very short season. We met a farmer last night in Youngstown and he told us that this year was the wettest for 10 years and as a consequence they are expecting bumper cereal crops so expect the grain prices to start falling this autumn.Today was our longest day so far both in terms of distance and time in the saddle. We were out for 6hrs 32 mins and with breaks etc it makes it a long day. Today it was about 20 minutes too long as we got caught in a thunder storm as we approached town. We didn’t get too wet but others did and some even had to take cover under farm trailers to avoid injury from hail stones, one of the ladies showed me a welt from a hail stone on her leg, it was about the size of a 20p bit.
As I type there is a thunder storm going on and people are trying to cook diner between down pours, I think I’m going to have to tie the tent down a little better as the rain is causing the outer fly to collapse… I’ll wait until it stops!
Onwards and Upwards!
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