The Tale of Two Countries

Back in the summer of 2016, I started road cycling, but I wasn't entirely sure what kind of cyclist I wanted to be. I'd tried casual riding (club/group rides) and done three races. This was enough to convince me that I liked racing, but there was one thing I hadn't yet tried, randonneuring. For those who don't know, randonneuring is basically just riding your bike really far (at least 200km) non-stop (nature breaks, food breaks, and sleep breaks for the longer ones) in a limited amount of time (13.5hrs for 200km). I was planning on trying the following year but at provincials, I met someone who wanted to ride to the US and back, and there's no way I was going to say no. This is that story.

I woke up REALLY early, which for me was around 5:30am, had something substantial for breakfast (probably four pieces of toast with jam and cheese or something like that), put two sandwiches, three Clif bars, and a bottle of Gatorade into my jersey pockets, another two bottles of water on my bike, and was out of the door in an astounding hour and ten minutes. That may sound like an embarrassingly long time, but I told my new friend that I'd meet him in St. Adolphe at 8am, so I wasn't in any sort of rush. About a kilometre into my ride I realized that I hadn't started Strava (at this point in life I genuinely believed Strava or it didn't happen), so I stopped, turned it on, and rode a rather uneventful 32km. It's worth pointing out that this was also the turn around point for what at the time was my favourite group ride.

After about a five minute wait at a gas station, Michael (my riding buddy) casually rolled up to the gas station. I made some remark about how punctual he was, not that I had arrived on time, he was just MORE late. After a quick chuckle, we were on our way. Neither of us had ever tried anything like this, so we set off at (what we thought was) a reasonable speed of 30kph.

Fifteen kilometres into our ride, we came across a stretch of gravel. This is probably something we should've thought about BEFORE a ride like this, but we were both riding road bikes with 25c tires. Not exactly ideal for ripping down gravel. Thankfully for us, rural gravel road in Manitoba have very little traffic. Ever. I'm pretty sure that only three vehicles passed us in the fifteen minutes of gravel, and one of them was a tractor.

Once we got off the gravel, we faced the single hardest part of the ride. To the left, a field. To the right, a field. Up, blue sky. Straight ahead, the horizon. To those who haven't been to Manitoba, it is very flat. How flat you may ask? Well, when I started riding down this road I didn't think anything of it, it looked like any other road through farm country (locally at least). About 5k we hit a stop sign. Half an hour after that we saw a group of trees and decided to take a nature break. Fifteen minutes after that we saw something in the distance, straight ahead of us, and started making bets as to what it was. Michael said a bridge, I said a barn, the wager was loser buys lunch. Forty-five minutes later we found out that it was a grain silo. We split the lunch bill.

So about now you're probably thinking "what's so hard about that?". Everything in that last paragraph was a list of all the interesting things that happened/were seen over roughly an hour and a half, 45km, and a STRAIGHT LINE. Alright well not everything, there were also a couple cars, a few more trees, three gentle bends in the road, two meters of elevation gain, and different crops in the fields. So back to how flat it is? Flat enough that you can have a road run 45km in what is essentially straight without hitting anything, and only gain 2 meters of elevation. For reference, 2 meters is a rather tall person, and 45km is, well, really far, you really need to ride it to have an understanding of how far it is.

After this mind-numbing experience, we turned into Dominion City. I was watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at the time, so deep down I was genuinely hoping that they'd have a statue of an alien on the main drag. Although I was slightly disappointed to discover that there were no alien statues, it was a picturesque farming town, they even had a horseshoe pitch that was as big as the playground at the community centre. As much as it would've been great to look around, we had places to be, so we filled up our water and continued on.

About an hour later we got to Emerson. Nobody in Winnipeg seems to know anything about Emerson other that "It's on the border", and passing through it was easy to see why. We looked for a place to eat but didn't see anything, so we continued on. As we rode out of town, the road turned so it ran parallel to the border, and we made started to think what would happen if we just crossed the border here. We decided not to act on that thought since we were five minutes from the border crossing that's, you know, not illegal.

As we rolled up to the border, we decided to stop at the immigration office on the Canadian side to take another washroom break, fill up on water, and ask about what we need to do to bring our bikes across the border in fear that we'd have to pay import taxes on the return trip. I'm not sure why we thought it was a good idea to do a ride like this on multi-thousand dollar race machines, but they assured us that nobody would question us coming back on bikes (For anyone wanting to cross the border for more than half an hour, there is actually a form).

After that pit stop we rolled up to the border crossing. We managed to get through in about five minutes, apparently noon on a Tuesday isn’t peak border-crossing time, I’m not complaining. Michael went up to the border guard first (we weren’t entirely sure if we counted as one vehicle or two, since we were together, and combined have the same amount of wheels as a car). After about thirty seconds, the border guard waved me up to go through all the questions that they’re obligated to ask. At the end of all the necessary questions like, how long are you going for? Half an hour. Why are you going? Well because we can. She asked to lift our bikes. I don’t know apparently high-end race bikes don’t get ridden across the border very often. We both obliged, partially because we’re proud of bikes, partially because you don’t just say no to a border guard, but mostly the first reason. She was amazed by how light they were.

Crossing into the U.S. was an interesting experience. I’d driven to Minneapolis a couple years earlier, but the experience is VERY different on a bike. When you’re in a car you’re going 80mph everything seems so much closer together. When you’re on a bicycle, you’re doing closer to 30kph, or 20mph. We instantly noticed how much smoother and wider the shoulders were, like seriously Canada, what’s our excuse for the bad roads, their climate isn’t that different from ours. We rode on to the small town of Pembina, North Dakota. It’s a small border town, and I’m pretty sure their biggest business is acting as a pick-up point for Manitobans who want things that only ship to the States. The town was distinctly American, mostly because of the flags on everybody’s houses. I thought this was just a stereotype of small-town America until that point but no, it’s a real thing. After five minutes of wandering we found the bridge that leads to Minnesota, which we crossed, and went to St Vincent (population 12 or something like that), where we took the only picture of the day.

Only took one picture all day, this is our turn around point.

We had done it, we had rode to two of the United States. As much as we wanted to celebrate, we had to turn around and head back. We got back to the border, had a surprisingly less nice experience with Canadian border security (It wasn’t bad, but the US border guard got out of the booth to talk to us/lift our bikes, it’s hard to top that). Another quick water stop at the border office, and a five minute ride back to Emerson had us both realizing two things. First, if you ever need to smuggle anything really small across the border, ride a bike, they don’t really question it. Second, it was hot, and we didn’t have enough energy to make it back home. This was kilometre 150.

Now Emerson isn’t exactly what I would refer to as “bustling”, so we had to resort to the local grocery store. We got 6 gatorades, two boxes of granola bars, some sandwiches, and apple turnovers. It wasn’t the healthiest lunch in the world, but we wanted all the carbs we could get. After finishing a gatorade, two sandwiches, half a box of granola bars, and three apple turnovers, we decided to save the rest for our long ride back.

As important as this lunch break was, it made me realized just how tired my legs were getting, and I was still over 100km from home. As much as I would’ve loved to curl up and take a nice long nap, I needed to continue on. Also Michael was feeling a lot better than me so he was able to push me (figuratively). It was hard to keep going at this point because I kept on telling myself I wanted to ride TO the states, which I had already done.

About 45 minutes later we made it back to Dominion City where we took another break, I don’t remember what for, probably water. It took us just over three hours to get back to St. Adolph (vs just over two hours the on the outbound leg) where we stopped at Subway to fill up on water and split a dozen cookies. We got a weird look as we both consumed two bottles of water, then filled them up again before leaving.

It took me about an hour and a half to get home from here. Michael joined me for the first twenty minutes, but he lives in a different direction, and was also wanting to go home and relax at this point. I was excited once I got to the city and was going noticeably faster despite having close to an hour of city riding before I got home.

Said and done it was a 12 hour day, 10 hours in the saddle, 260km, 1 province, 2 states, 2 countries, averaged 25.8kph, and had a total elevation gain of 112m (yes, one-hundred twelve).

Would I do this again? Not a chance. Maybe if it was a race with a big group, but I’m not cut out for touring, at least on flat, straight, Manitoba roads, that said, I did learn some lessons that are useful for people who WANT to ride through Manitoba (or the prairies in general).

First, bring something to listen to, thankfully I had a person, so I wasn’t stuck in silence, but you don’t want to talk for twelve hours. Second, make sure that you’re prepared to be bored out of your mind. It’s honestly so flat and boring you could probably watch a movie and just set your bars straight, I’m not recommending it, but you probably could. If you have a chance to stop for food and/or water, take it. Especially on the smaller roads, towns can be few and far between. Finally, eat before you’re hungry, drink before you’re thirsty. In the summer it can be deceptively hot, and once you start cracking it’s incredibly difficult to stop it.

So that's the Tale of Two Countries. As always, if you have questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment, or email me at KelseyGoesCycling@gmail.com . I also learned that you can subscribe to my blog via E-mail. If that's the kind of thing that interests you, head back up to the top of the page and press the subscribe button. If you want to look at the ride, here's a link to Strava.

Stay cool internet :)