We were up early today in Rushing River as we wanted to try and beat the traffic on Highway 17 this morning. We headed out towards Kenora with a lovely light tailwind and what turned out to be a gorgeous shoulder on Highway 17. Kenora has a bypass highway (17A) so very few trucks followed us into town.
In Kenora, we stopped at Walmart and a PC Supermarket and picked up supplies. We stopped to enjoy the waterfront a bit and get our picture taken with Husky the Muskie. This follows our habit of getting our picture taken with all giant statues!
We headed out of Kenora to Manitoba!! With a quick stop for some fried in Canola Oil fries along the way, we covered the distance quickly given the tailwind averaging 30 to 40km/h! My father had told me that it was a long gentle downhill into Manitoba and I’m afraid to say that there are actually some hills there. These things are always more obvious on a bike than in a car. The traffic was fairly heavy with Manitobans returning home from Kenora cottage country after the weekend and trucks as this is the only road through, but the traffic didn’t make much difference thanks to our beautiful 10ft shoulder (we can see how this would give cyclists the wrong impression of the TCH if you were biking west to east)!
Finally, we got to the Manitoba border after 45 days in Ontario (although we did take 2 weeks off)! I was very excited to see the sign marking the border. Couldn’t quite kiss it because it was too high.
We stopped for lunch at the Manitoba tourist office. They had cold water and free highway maps…we even noticed their campground prices were between $8 to $20 (compared to Ontario which was usually $30 to 38). Things were definitely looking up! We had our first good look at the highway map and were relieved that it had a much more reasonable scale compared to Northern Ontario.
We got on Highway 1 and encountered probably the worst stretch because of construction and the entire surface was that ground down vertical line pattern that tends to grab your wheels and throw them in strange directions. Combine this with trucks and heavy traffic and the odd construction pylon…a bit stressful even though we had a lot of room. Luckily the turn to Highway 44 was close by. Highway 44 left a lot to be desired in terms of surface quality but at least it was paved (and apparently the old Trans-Canada…that must have been quite a journey!). It was very windy so you had to be aware of people flying around corners quickly but the traffic was very light. We moved pretty quickly with the tailwind and pulled into Rennie at a very reasonable time. Rennie was a great touring cyclist town, with the general store stocking a good variety of food!
We had heard that the local RV-only campground offered free camping to touring cyclist so we headed down the gravel road to check it out. Turns out the word-of-mouth of fellow touring cyclists were true, with our host John saying that “if you’re crazy enough to bike across this country, you can definitely have a hot shower on us”. He told us about their indoor rec room, where we were welcome to cook dinner and hang out inside. He camp to chat to us later in the evening and we had a great time. He said he usually sees 30 to 40 cyclists a year, but we were the only ones biking west (he said we were even crazier!). Apparently he even had a cyclist hang around for 3 days (probably because it was so nice). He and his wife Bev definitely run a nice place, with gorgeous washrooms and hot showers! Thank you John and Bev!!
Trip Around The World 
Leave a comment