Hi All:
My Manitoba adventure continues....
I woke up in my little hotel room in Superior Wisconsin this morning and it was piddling down rain <dang!> so I bedded down for a little extra sleep. The funny thing is that the weather forecast was for mainly clear skies all day and all the way to Winnipeg (which was about 400 miles / 700 km away). Anyhow, by about 10 AM the skies were cloudy but the rain had stopped, so I loaded up Sylvia and set off for the day. Note that beaded mat thingy on the seat - I installed it just before I left Windsor and by gosh, it’s pretty good! The ST community is always griping about the stock seat. I don’t find it that bad, but I must admit that 8-10 hours is a bit much. That beaded mat ($16 at an auto supply store) did actually help a bit.
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I had a choice of heading west from Duluth and going through Grand Forks ND and then straight north to the ‘Peg or heading due north to International Falls and then west along the south shore of Lake of the Woods which forms the border with Canada. I looked carefully at the weather along both routes....and chose the northern route. Well, that didn’t work out so well as the piddling from the sky started again about 20 miles north of Duluth and it basically kept on and off all day. The terrain across northern Wisconsin and Minnesota is like the UP of Michigan: rolling but heavily wooded and not very populated.
Once I was past the greater Duluth area, I don’t think I saw more than 50 other vehicles until I got to the Canadian border. The formalities there took literally seconds and then more straight roads, lots of trees and few people until I arrived in the little town of Steinbach Manitoba at 7:00 PM (around 50 km south of Winnipeg). I’ll ride into the city tomorrow as my meeting starts on Thursday morning.
In Steinbach I am staying at a tidy little motel called the Sleep Suite Inn. The folks there kindly allowed me to park under the awning between the columns which keeps my bike away from the large construction company trucks and trailers that dot the parking lot.
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In my experience, parking in amongst those types of vehicles often ends unhappily for the bike. There is a good deal of construction around this area including summer telephone and hydro pole maintenance which is a messy-muddy business as evidenced by the sign on the door of the hotel.
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I doubt I will see a sign like that tomorrow at the elegant downtown Fort Garry Hotel - but it’s OK by me.
Cheers,
Pete