Day 24 — Sunday, July 13

Richer to Kenora — 158.8 km
I woke up feeling like garbage. It was hot outside and I was sweating just from this weird virus. I didn’t feel good.

We’re really good at leaving late in the day. Today we left at 12:30 p.m. and were aiming for Kenora. After about 10 km of decent highway, we hit probably the worst highway I’ve ever rode on. It was ridiculous. Not only were the shoulders terrible, the lanes themselves were in rough shape and we could hear the cars hitting bump after bump.

The bugs were also terrible. They kept attacking us — so as we’re trying to navigate around holes in the road, we’re trying to swat horseflies off our arms and keep them from flying around our faces. One eventually found its way into Vanessa’s shirt, which naturally made her brake hard, fall on the rough shoulder, get ran over by Kelly, and then get the fly out. The fly was likely oblivious to what had just happened and it probably just flew onto the next cyclist that went by. What geniuses flies are. We now make a point of punching all flies in the face when they come near us.

We stopped at a provincial park and ate at a town called Falcon Lake. I slammed some sort of Reuben sandwich, which consisted of a pile of cheese, some other sort of goop, and some sort of meat substance. It was actually really good.

We enter Ontario and stop at the big sign welcoming us. Awesome! We take some photos and then continue on. Man, the roads became so much better. They're like we're back in Alberta now. Perfect!

Slowly, but surely, we make it to Kenora where we find a very nice campground. Just riding into Kenora at night was cool. It looked so nice with the water and the lights at night. I bet I could spend a few days in Kenora without running out of things to do.

We check our schedule to see what the next town was and we discover that we were actually just planning to stop at Fulcan Lake and Kenora was our stop for tomorrow. Sweet! We were actually two days behind at this point, but now we were just one day behind. But, we were also planning to have a rest day in Kenora. We decided to keep moving on. So now we were back on schedule.

The alumni people asked if we could take another rest day prior to Ottawa, so we can afford to have a rest day still. Which we’ll certainly use someday soon.