From Neepawa to Brandon (or, I REALLY don’t like highway 10!)

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From Neepawa to Brandon (or, I REALLY don’t like highway 10!)

Tuesday, 17 July 2007

It was moving day again for us & according to my GPS Brandon was only about 55 kilometres away, so I decided to take Blue & cycle to our motel there. The only problem was that my GPS doesn’t recognize many of the roads around here, even fairly significant ones, so that measurement was “as the crow flies”, not as the roads run. (But of course at the time I hadn’t come to that conclusion...)

So off I went, on highway 16, which runs in front of the motel, heading west to highway 10. By doing so, one adds considerably to the distance travelled - it’s like a right triangle. So by the time I’d reached highway 10, with 40 kilometres to go before reaching Brandon, I’d already travelled 30 kilometres. (Add 30 + 40 - it’s not 55)

But at least I was on highway, on the pavement, or was I?!? Highway 10 south of highway 16 is a very heavily travelled road, with only one lane in each direction, and virtually NO paved shoulder (save that which is under a fairly thick layer of gravel & debris). And lots of the people are driving in a hurry. There were about 8-10 times I felt it was MUCH safer to go onto the shoulder rather than to stay on the pavement, and that really doesn’t make for a “fun” ride, especially on a “road bike”. It’s frustrating and annoying because highway 16 has lovely wide paved shoulders, free of debris, yet there was hardly any traffic to speak of on that stretch.

Fortunately my “knight in a shiny white van” caught up with me at some point soon after I’d eaten my lunch. He & Panna had attempted to walk a new set of paths south of Neepawa, way off the beaten track. He had one really neat experience on the way there: a lone white-tailed deer was in the ditch area along the road & for some reason it chose to run alongside the van for a good ways - alas, he was unable to get his camera out & get a photo of it (something to do with driving & watching the road & the deer, in case it decided to cross in front of him). But when he got to the entry point of the trails, the first thing he saw was a nice yellow sign warning trail users to be “bear safe” - and it was a little too soon after his encounter at Sandy Lake & a little too close for comfort. So he left & returned to the set of trails we’d used the first day we were in Neepawa - and actually found a place where he could let Panna go off-leash, which she THOROUGHLY enjoyed.

Anyway, I told Bob that I didn’t think I’d be able to make it all the way to the motel. However there’s a Tim Horton’s on a service road next to the Trans Canada Highway, where we’d stopped previously, and we decided we should meet up there, after he’d gone to the motel & checked in. So that’s what we did. Only thing, neither of us was in the mood to stand in the line-up there at that time for a coffee, so we simply borrowed their parking lot to load up the bike & me.

DAY 24: 68.5 km, in 3:45 hours, ave. speed 18.2 km/hr, max. speed 29.9 km/hr

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Photos

17 july '07 Close-up view of the 'shoulder' on highway 10, north of Brandon, Mb
The pavement, the darker bit below the white stripe, is barely as wide as that stripe. Beyond it is a rough, soft, gravel-covered shoulder