You don't know what you've got till it's gone

Woke up in Thunderbay this morning.  We lost another hour so 7am wake-up was difficult.  Thankfully we don't have another time change for another few days - 3 timezones in 3 days can be a bit taxing.  We got going by 7:45 and headed to the Thunderbay Restaurant on Donna's recommendation.  Got to know the owner Denyse who is positively wonderful.  We had a great chat and she fed us really well.  Her specialty are the finnish pancakes and they were lovely - reminded me of mum's.  Finished up breakfast and Denyse sent us off with a great big hug each.

We headed back to the the hotel for the pack up and I realized I didn't have my Treo Pro.  Disaster!  I need that smartphone to do the YouTube video's, plus I had 3 days worth of videos sitting in it.  I look everywhere and it's no where to be seen.  I retrace my steps all thru town - no luck.  Ishan goes to the filling station to see if I dropped it there.  I go back to the hotel for a last look - hopefully third time is the charm.  No luck at all.  I resign myself to the reality that it's lost.  I go into my bag of electrics to put the helmet camera onto charge for today's ride and low and behold there's the Treo Pro on charge!  I swear I looked there but my absent mind got the best of me.  Ishan gives 2 eye rolls for this one.

This saga has cost us an hour so we don't hit highway 17 until 10 am.  Once we get going the riding is good.  We're in the flow of it now and the daily riding is smooth and fun.  There's not too much talking, a quick hand signal and we know what the other is getting at, and our speeds are in good sync.  We're back in our rhythm just like it's southern Morrocco.  We've got great roads today all along Lake Superior.  This is just more spectacular stuff.

This is the storybook Northern Canada that Stompin' Tom sings about.  We're riding accross great big granite slabs, quintessential Ontario lake country with sign after sign warning about moose on the road.  It's a perfect sunny day with lovely light.  The sun is making the trees glow and the glittering lakes and rivers seem to be smiling at us as we roll along.

We make a quick pit stop at the Serndipity cafe in Rossport because Denyse recommended it.  I  have the blueberry shortcake and a coffee - it felt like the right lunch today.

It's better to be on the bike than off it today so we saddle back up and get cranking.  I'm switching up the soundtrack - K-OS is going full force and I'm racing by the glorious Ontario forrest in my b-boy stance.

The light is starting to fade so we pull into Wawa to pickup supplies for the gourmand meal for the night.  I pull out my Pre to send a tweet.  I'm desperate for a bio-break so I quickly put the phone away and take care of more urgent business. We pack away the dinner supplies and head out to find a camp for the night.

We find a spot in Lake Superior park and settle in for the evening.  We get camp all set and I head out to gather some firewood.

Tea is on, fire is roaring and we're done going over the day's events and the route for tomorrow.  Time for me to slip into my sleeping bag and write my thoughts for the day.  I reach into my jacket for my Pre but all I find is its beautiful suede case.  Alarm bells start to go off.  I can't have lost my gorgeous new Pre.  After having it for just 1 week I've come to totally depend on it even when I'm in the Canadian hinterland.

There's no sense in ripping apart the camp in the dark - we'll have to see how this plays out in the morning.  Hopefully the shine of a new day will reveal its location and put my mind to rest.

Next morning -
I had a couple of wolves come visit me in the night.  They sniffed me and woke me up then wandered over to the bikes to check them out (everyone loves the bikes).  They had a peek around and then went off on their merry way.  It was just a freindly visit by our wild canine comrades but my heart still skipped a beat.

After my morning tea a fellow camper on the lake dropped by for a visit.  He was curious if we had dropped a phone.  His wife found it on the road last night.  It must have fell out of my pocket when I was scoping tent sites.  Rod Smith and wife - you have my hearty gratitude.

The Pre is back in my pocket and ready to explore points eastward.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

Timmies Trifecta

Started out from Winnipeg this morning after a good nights sleep.  Followed our usual morning ritual of packing the bikes and going over the days route then gassing up.

We pulled into a filling station that was connected to a Tim Hortons - nothing unusual about that.  This was the last Timmies between Winnipeg and Ontario.  It would be our first day in Ontario so starting out with a coffee and some timbits was mandatory.  Turns out alot of other hearty Canadian travellers had the same idea.  The line up for the drive through went across the parking lot, through the fillling station and onto the highway.

Ok so breakfast is done and we hit the road.  Its the saturday of labour day weekend so everyone is out - we'll be doing alot of passing today.

The praries quickly fade and start turning into northern Ontario forest.  It's clear that we've hit the great Canadian shield.  There's granite everywhere, meandering rivers with the forest right in its midst - very special stuff.

The moose warning signs start coming up very regularly and the lakes begin to pop into the landscape.  You expect to see a mountie emerge from this wilderness on horseback and ask you if you've stored your food properly so the bears don't get it.

We arrive in Kenora after a few hours and stop in for a fill up and a stretch.  A friendly old timer pulls up next to us on a bumblebee yellow segway and gives a hello and asks us about our bikes.  We have a great chat - we tell him about the trip and he fills us in on the local roads, cool spots and the secret back country locales where he used to go snowmobiling.  We give him a sticker and part ways with a hand shake.  He sticks the donkeys logo right smack in the middle of his segway and he takes off like a shot.  This guy knows how to make that thing move.

Fuel pit is over.  We jump back on the bikes and start cranking it.  I'm so excited to see Northern Ontario and we still need to get alot of kms behind us today.

The road is fantastic - alot of it has just been repaved.  There are nice big sweeping turns, mountain passes where the road has been blasted into the rock, and big straight-aways that go downhill and open up to the perfect Canadian forrest views.

It's 2:30 and we're hungry.  Next town is Ignace.  Low and behold there's a Timmies right ahead. We pull in and get the primo parking spot.  Timmies stop number 2 of the day.

We're about 20 kms from Thunderbay when the sun turns into moon and we ride into TBay by moonlight - the forrest sillouette by moonlight is a wonderfully canadian experience.  As we get into town we need some dinner and a place to lay our heads but we have no idea where to go.  I stop into a Shoppers and accost a couple of ladies in the makeup section and ask them where the downtown and fun spots are.  I meet Donna who is wonderfully helpful.  I must have looked quite out of sorts so she took pity on us and offerred to show us around.

We followed behind her as she lead us around the town showing us the places to be and the hotels/motels where we could sleep easy and not worry about the bikes.  As we thank 
Her for all her help she gives us her phone number in case we have any problems.

We pick a hotel and get settled in.  Now we're ready for dinner and we decide to call Donna to see if we can offer some dinner in consideraions for her kindness.  Well she takes it 1 step forward - she's told Wes about us and he's a motorcycle nut so he's up for chatting bikes and routes.

They pick us up from the hotel and take us to Gargoyles for dinner.  It's great conversation - we talk about bikes, trips, roads, how best to stay dry, how best to stay warm.  They clue us into the history of Thunderbay and how the community is a result of 2 towns merging together.  They were wonderful company and made us feel like old friends.

It used to be when someone mentioned Thunderbay I would think of Paul Shafer and the freezing cold.  Now Thunderbay will be memories of Donna, Wes, and friendship.

Ps.  I had a hankering for something sweet late night.  Luckily there was a Timmies across the street from the hotel.  Timmies hat trick on our first day in Ontario.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

Who Smashed What?

Today was a ride and a half.  We rode from Pincher Creek to Regina and saw a lot of stuff in between.

We broke camp bright and early and headed straight for the head smashed in buffalo jump.  It was a beautiful ride through some hilly plains.  We got to the interpretive centre just as it openned and headed straight for the top.  We had a visit from a family of deer and a tour by some prairie dogs as we contemplated the ingenuity of the aboriginals.  It was a great spot and a heck of a way to hunt the wild bison.  The natives would herd the bison over a cliff and setup a butcher shop at the bottom - smart thinking.

We jumped back on the bikes and started eating up some road.  We got hungry around Lethbridge and stumbled on a family farm called Boxburn farm.  We settled in for an early lunch and chatted with our lovely waitress, Jacinta.  Boxburn is a medium sized farm that grows strawberries, raspberries, peppers, and other veggies.  They supply alot of Calgary restaurants and IGA.  Even though they produce and sell a sizeable volume there is no cutting corners on health and flavour.  They're not a strictly organic farm but everything they do on the farm leaves you feeling good about eating their veggies.

Boxburn is a recently started family farm.  This got me scratching my head abit because we're constantly hearing you can't make a living at farming and how the family farm is turning into a relic of a bye-gone era yet here is someone who has recently taken up farming and is making a go at it with some good success.

Boxburn runs a shop and a little cafe as well as the farm and our lunch at the cafe turned into a special occasion - neither of us had ever had saskatoon berry pie, today we were going to rectify that.  It was love at first bite.  Sweet and sour at the same time - lovely.

After lunch we were back on the road to Regina.  We were transitioning into the straight, fast, and windy roads of the praries.  The road was just as I expected.   Lon, linear and flanked on both sides by wheat and corn.  It's harvest time so both crops are at maturity but it's early so they haven't been cut yet.  This was an amazing site - a road that melts into the horizon surrounded by fully grown wheat and tall grass dancing in the wind.  I've never seen anything like this; the shear size of the praries is overwhelming.

We ended the day by riding into Regina by the light of a full moon that filled the night sky.  This was my prarie reality - the dream couldn't have been any better.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

Afternoon siesta...on the bike!

Ok, so in all this dashing around on the bikes and eating scrumptious meals in combination with the afternoon sun has lead to a few head bobs from our friend Riz. On our way to Sudbury, Riz crackels over the coms and says he needs a break. So we pull off into the next suitable area just off the road, Riz says "hey just need to close my eyes for 5 minutes..." words trailing out of his mouth he puts his kickstand down and then a leg and rests his head on the tank bag - helmet and all still on! Within a minute I hear snoring...I was sure he be up in a jolt as the next truck comes barrelling by - nope - he's out cold and manages to stay asleep in that position on the side of the road for 40 minutes (despite my attempts to shake him awake)!! When he finally does wake up on his own - he has this perplexed look on his face - the kind where you trying to figure out where the heck you are and what just happened. He is in disbelief that he was in la-la land in that position for that long...hmmm maybe need to cut down on the lunch portion sizes?! Anway, I put my gear back on and jump back on the bike and we're off again.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

It's Africa hot

We're riding through the Canadian praries and it's blowing my mind.  I've never been through this part of the country and it is beautiful.

Riding a motorcycle through the prairie straights is not quite the piece of cake everyone was thinking.  We're going through cross winds of up to 80 kms and the drafts of the semi's are different in the wide open spaces.  It's just like boating at home.  These ginormous trucks make an air wake just like boats in the water so i've got to battle through the air displaced on the sides (there are alot of ripples) and then punch through the big bow wave.  It can be pretty intense with the combo of the cross/head winds.  These winds have been so strong that our fuel range is half of normal.

We've been so tired at the end of these days - I didn't expect that.  The wind mixed with this intense heat has been draining.  The person inside the television machine says it was 37 for a good chunk of the day.  When we rode through the Sahara we only had a day or 2 that were this hot.  It tires me out to the point where I get a little drowsy on the bike and we have to pit for a refresher.

You may ask, "how hot was it?" - it was so hot that the thingie that holds my camera onto the helmet melted off.  This thing was stuck to my helmet with industrial adhesive.  It's been tested to some ridiculous amount of weight and 2 days in this scorching heat has diminished its power so badly that it can't hold a 300 gram camera.  This my friends is an extreme condition.

This heat isn't the only comparison to the desert.  All the wheat fields are fully grown and ready for harvest and there is a lot of dry grass around so you see a great deal of yellow in the landscape and there are these little groves of trees in the middle of a vast field.  They plant the trees with the house so you have this little oasis in the midst of a field that stretches from horizon to horizon.
These trees make all the difference - without them it would feel like a baren landscape but instead you get the sense that there are people around, people that connect the west to the east.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

Slow food in Calgary at Rouge

So as you've probably read, at the end of day three, we hooked up with Riz's buddy Trace in Calgary who really took care of us "biker dudes - here comes trouble..." - as I'm sure that is what all his neighbours were thinking as we roared in after circling the area a few times trying to figure out the crazy house numbering system... Well ok, we do have a tendency to get temporarily displaced - not to be confused with being lost! Besides, the Pre saved us again, pinpointing our exact spot with the blue dot, only for us to look up and see Trace standing in his driveway laughing!

Anyway, I digress... after settling in we headed out for dinner at Rouge.

We sit outside by their garden and are invited to stroll around and check
it out as this is where all the vegies and fruits served at the restaurant, that we are soon to eat, are grown! This is real slow food. 

We chat up the servers and talk about the origins of everything on their menu and even get the lowdown on Bio-Dynamic farming - it's the whole organic, slow food movement at a whole other level - I mean everything that is done at these farms is to serve a purpose - like burying Elk's bladder in the soil at specific distances to keep certain insects away from a vineyard. Sounds completly bizarre, but every step serves a purpose to ultimately help with growing food - all done organically.

So, what did we eat - Riz and Trace opted for the Chef's special menu - jumbo prawns, arctic char with seared truffle mash potatoes. I decided to try some Elk medallions with a beetroot and arugula salad. We finished with fresh fruit and a creme brulee.

 A delicious meal and a splendid evening talking about food, living  and motorcycles adventures.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

Alpine resort in the Rockies...

So after a weird morning on day two yesterday, we ended it in style at the Mozart inn nestled in the "Alpine Resort" town of Kimberly, British Columbia.

We were served up some authentic European food - Wiener Schintzel and some special spinach Speckknodel for Riz. The food was excellent and our server Aleria was very sweet as she put up with our last minute order and non-stop questions since we were surprized to hear that it was their last night and they were closing the place down and heading back to Europe

All said a good meal and friendly conversation - a splendid way to end the day.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē