Day 28 June 27, 125km, 276m Vertical, 19°C overcast, strong NW wind

Cartwright to Winkler.
A cool start around 9am with zilch for breakfast. The possibility of 10mm of rain was forecast but fortunately we only had a few drops and the bad weather stayed about 50km north of us. It was an uneventful start and we targeted Crystal City (a grand name for a farming village) for a breakfast stop.

Now I must digress to provide some background info. A few days ago TimB noticed that the left hand lowrider frame was rattling and he found that the metal around the bottom screw holding the frame onto the bottom of the fork had broken. We needed somebody who could weld aluminium.

We hadn’t spotted anywhere open to get it fixed until entering Crystal City. The guy at the first auto repair shop sent us round the corner to a workshop where there was somebody who it appeared was able to repair a wide variety of machines. John Pride is the man. His inspection of the problem on TimB’s bike elicited the comment “who made this piece of crap?” but he didn’t pursue this line of enquiry seriously and proceeded to remove the frame and retire into the workshop. In the meantime 3 other local men have turned up and suddenly six chairs are set up in the workshop and we all sit down and chat away. Before too long John has welded a new end piece onto the lowrider frame, drilled a new whole, sprayed it black and fitted it back on the bike. What service, what a hero, and for a miserly 10$ (6.60 Euros) for all his effort. My guess is that John’s repair will easily outlast the other mountings.. After this marvellous experience we stayed in the village for lunch (being in the meantime too late for breakfast) and then set off for La Riviere where we dropped into the river valley hitting 68kph for the first time since the Rockies and had a short tea break before starting the climb out of the valley. Lariviere is the home of the wild turkey. The next 10km were a dream. A brand new asphalt surface as close to being as smooth as a billiard table as a road can be. In the meantime the prairie wind had strengthened to 40+kph and we tore along the last 50km to Winkler at 40-45kph. It was great. Let’s have more. We have now settled in a motel here for our rest day.