Holla ... soooo today was our bike ride from Brandon to Moosomin! Which is about 140km :| baaaaaah sooo long. The upside was that .... in the morning at least .... we had TAIL WIND!! yaaaay. But the very beginning of the day started off a little bit rough in that .... as I was packing one of my panniers I mannaged to break a buckle! Which are kind of necessary when you're on a massive bike ride during this time of year when it's supposed to be rainy and such, and we realized on the first night that we forgot to get tent pegs! So we needed some tent pegs and such ... so during breakfast (which was AMAZING ... Jackie put together basically a breakfast buffet with eggs, banana bread, cheese, cantelope, toast, and many more delicious items ... mmm sooo good) we asked where the closest Canadian Tire was and Jim offered to drive us! :D So we stopped off at Canadian tire before we started biking and got some last minute items. We did have another little hiccup as we were biking out of Brandon ... I (Sachi) was drafting behind Melanie a little too close and bumped my front tire on her back tire ... lost control ... and ... inevitably fell ... hard ... maybe even skidded a bit on the dirt (thank goodness) shoulder. That hurt ... a lot, but this really nice man screeched to a halt on the other side of the road. backed up and asked us if we were okay and everything and offered us a ride ... and when Melanie said ... we're going to BC ... he said "well if that's what you need, we'll make it happen"!!! How nice was that .... we love Canada!
It was sooo glorious once we got back onto the main highway off out of Brandon, we were biking probably 20-25 km an hour (which is very good for us) and it hadn't started raining yet. We decided to stop for lunch at this cute little family restaurant/diner where the whole town of Oak Lake (famous home of Isaac the cow) was dining as well. Upon leaving we found that the wind had changed from a beautiful tail wind to a horrible side/head wind aaaaaaand the rain had begun! Soooo sad. We also had realized how glorious the morning had been as our knees had not been hurting too badly, which definitely wasn't the case in the afternoon. Not only had our right knees started to hurt badly but Mel's left knee was hurting badly and my left achilles heel started to hurt! BAAAAAH ... we hate injuries. We definitely were struggling a bit in the afternoon and were freezing cold and pretty much soaked to the bone, despite all the rain gear we had on. At one point we stopped in the small town of Virden to see how much further it was to Moosomin to see if we could actually make it there and we were told it was only about 40 km further ... we got SUPER excited and figured ya we can totally do that! Yaaaay. ... ... ... ... buut ... .. .. ... ... it wasn't 40 km ... ... ... .. .. it was more like 65 ish km. Yes we know that doesn't seem like that much more ... but when you're biking and you're biking with a head wind when it's pouring rain and the temperature is hovering below zero with the wind that extra 25 km is a whoooooole lot. We found out about this when we stopped to warm ourselves up with some "english toffee coffee" at the gas station in Elkhorn ... when we had thought we only had around 20 km more and it was really 40. Soooo we chilled out ... literally ... in the gas station for awhile warming our hands on the coffee and sitting on the floor, deliberating our next plan of action. This is when we saw the sign for an Inn just a little ways down the road. At this point we were completely soaked, frozen, and hurting ... alot. The prospect of camping in the downpour was not appealing in the least. By this point we had decided that we weren't going to try and bike any further and would either stay at the inn in Elkorn or hitch a ride into Moosomin. So our plan of attack was to stand on the side of the highway for 10 min and if we weren't picked up we would go back into town. Luckily this moving truck pulled up within seconds of us standing there, We had spoken to one of the men in the gas station and he just wanted to check first with his friend if it was alright to pick up these two drowned rats. So we put our bikes in teh back and hopped in the beautifully warm cab for a lovely ride. The problem arrose when the weigh station at the sask border was actually unesxpectedly open. Apparently they have camera's waaaaaaay before you actually reach it and already had seen that there were 4 of us in a 3 person cab (which they thought was a 2 person)... and... the truck was already overloaded. So Sachi and I sent up some prayers as we drove over the scale... unfortunately we got the red light. The patrol man came out and asked what was in the truck and why there was 4 people in a cab with 2 seatbelts. We were then asked to pull over and the driver had to go in with his license and registraation. He went in and then came back out a few minutes later asking us all to come in with ID. So of course our ID was in the back of the moving truck so it took a little while for us to get it out and then just as we had finally got it out the patrolman started walking over to us. Meanwhile, we were both still soaked and freezing cold, basically convulsing with coldness as the patrolman walked over. He then proceeded to interogate us as to what was the purpose of our trip and why were we biking at this time of year, saying that we were going to get ourselves killed biking in this weather and such and yet .... he let us off ... not one of us got a ticket and the patrolman just said that we should get to Moosomin and stay there for awhile until the weather gets better .... right ... like that's gonna happen. Anyway so we dodged a bullet there and thankfully didn't cost the nice guys giving us a ride any money and got a ride into Moosomin!
Once we finally got to Moosomin we gave a call to the local Anglican Church and spoke to Rev. Michael and he said he would find us a place to stay for the night which was awesome! We hung out at the church and had some tea for a bit while Rev. Michael made some phone calls to parishioners around town. We ended up staying with this really sweet elderly couple Marilyn and Ralph Woods who were pretty close to town which was great cause we didn't have to bike far to get there. Marilyn and Ralph were soooo helpful and sweet. They let us keep our bikes in their garage and gave us some rags to wipe down our bikes and bags with and even let us do a bunch of much needed laundry! Mmmmm clean clothes :D. Our clothes had gotten pretty dirty because of the rain and even more dirty because some of the roads in Moosomin are just dirt roads ... very muddy haha. Anyway so they helped us get settled in, gave us a really nice spare bedroom with a big bed to share and ordered some Chinese food for supper which Rev. Michael joined us for. After dinner we attempted to do some yoga (very difficult when you can't even walk properly ... ), had a shower and went to bed ... believe it or not ... before Marilyn and Ralph!
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