Discouragement in the Soo

---

Discouragement in the Soo

Friday, 17 August 2007

Today was a difficult day for me. There was a road which appeared to be quite inviting on the map, something like the ones I’d tried in Wawa & Fort Frances. However, between the weather conditions, VERY windy, rainy & cold, and the type of road, not so many hills but looong ones, fairly steep too, I had to call it quits after only 10 kilometres and call for a “pick-up”. It’s as if Someone was telling me not to go, because the weather cleared up temporarily while I made the decision not to proceed & called Bob - had to use the satellite phone, as the cell phone had no service there. The weather then got crappy again when I decided to continue until the “white knight van” arrived.

Bob was trying to do laundry, plus he was suffering quite a bit of headache & neck & back pain resulting from his knock on the noggin yesterday, so he was more than happy to let me take Panna for a long walk at Kinsmen’s Park. We had a great time, as I took the opportunity to go on some paths we choose to not use when I’m with Bob - we actually found a fantastic, twisting path, very clear to follow, which was wide enough for only one person (or deer, or bear!). Panna had a great time running ahead of me, jumping over the obstacles in her way, yet keeping an eye on me. We also had the pleasure of getting lost, finding the bottom of a ski hill, then finding our way back again - yes, I am one of those nutcases who enjoy getting into “trouble” just to work my way out of it.

Upon our return to the motel, I went to check on the laptop. It seems they could find nothing defective with the hardware, which is good, I guess. However they felt there was a problem with my operating system, in that it had somehow become corrupted, and the only options were to back up the hard drive onto an external drive & re-install Windows XP. It is hoped that most of the files are on that external drive, although the fellows were not able to re-install all of them - at the moment we’ve “lost” all of Bob’s photos (we just hope they’re on that drive & that they can be extracted somehow) and many of mine (although many of those are still in my camera, as I’d gotten a huge memory card for it & have not had to delete as many as Bob did). Also, of course, except for the MS Office set of programs (Word, Excel, etc) for which I happened to have the CD’s in my laptop case, all of my extra software, WordPerfect, the photo editing software for my camera, and the mapping software for the GPS, to name a few of the more important programs, has been erased, so I cannot do a lot of the things in the manner to which I am accustomed. But they kindly installed a driver for my wireless add-on, so at least I can go on-line & can continue writing for the blog. And I’ll try to download some photo-editing software, even if it costs a little bit, to try to get back to work on the photos. Just a little bit more to do!

And to top off the crappy day, we seemed to be quite unable to find a suitable place to have dinner, and wound up at a local Harvey’s (a Canadian burger place, which IS actually fairly tasty sometimes, maybe just not what you’d want for dinner).

DAY 50: 10.3 km on the bicycle, didn’t even bother with the speed data, it was such a waste; then 6.2 km on foot with my “girl”

---