Day 28 Portage La Prairie to Beausejour, Manitoba

 107.8 miles, 491 ft. ascent,  cycling time 8 hours 41 minutes

We had an extremely long and exhausting riding day due to an incessant head wind.  We crossed the center of Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba, with a population of 850,000.  There were a number of challenges along our route.  One road was full of potholes that were difficult to deal with because of the morning's rain.  I punctured the sidewall of my front tire when my wheel bottomed out hard in a deep pothole filled with water.  That caused two flats, because I didn't see the small hole in the sidewall when I replaced the tube the first time.  Closer inspection after the second flat revealed that the sidewall had been punctured, so I booted the tire.  (A tire boot is a layer of material inserted on the inner surface of the tire that stops the tube from extruding itself through the hole in the tire.  I had a commercial boot with an adhesive backing that sticks to the tire's inside wall, but in a pinch, a dollar bill will work too.)  Challenge number two was riding for several miles on loose gravel, sometimes in downhill stretches.  This type of riding would not have been a problem for a gravel bike with wide tires, but we were riding road bikes with narrow tires.  

Here you see the Manitoba provincial  legislative (parliament) building.  It was completed in 1920, along with its famous "Golden Boy", a gold covered bronze statue  of the Roman god Mercury, that sits atop the building's cupola

 

Because Polar bears are abundant in the northern part of Manitoba, there were many statues of them in a park beside the parliament building.

Below you see the Human Rights Center in Winnipeg.

 

And the skyline of downtown Winnipeg.

 

 

Below you are viewing the Red River of the North or Rouge du Nord in Winnipeg.  It originates between Minnesota and North Dakota, and it flows northward through the Red River Valley, forming most of the border of Minnesota and North Dakota, then continuing into Manitoba.  It empties into Lake Winnipeg, whose waters join the Nelson River before flowing into Hudson Bay.

 

At last, we rode into our campsite at 20:30, wolfed down some spaghetti that had been kept warm for us.  I then settled down in my tent, wet from the morning's downpour.  Still it was a good day.

Apologies for the tardiness of this chapter.  Cell coverage was poor, and we were occupied with achieving our daily objective in the midst of the challenging conditions.  Another post for Day 29 will follow shortly.