Day 39

Sunday, August 1st
Neys to White Lake
102km

Today was the “official” half-way point of the trip. According to the planned route (which rarely ties perfectly with the distance on my speedomoter) we have finished 3,843km after today's ride, out of an eventual total of 7,544km. Neither of these distances include the trip from Vancouver to Victoria and back, which was an optional extra trip.

To look at things slightly differently, today is day 39 out of a total of 74 days, so we are more than half-way in terms of time.

Anyway you look at it, the trip seems to be flying by. So much has happened, but I can't believe that we are already finished with the rockies and prairies and into Ontario. I've heard that Quebec and the maritimes are very scenic, so at least I have something to look forward to on the second half of this adventure.

To celebrate “half-way-day”, the entire group stopped for lunch in a park today. Usually we eat breakfast and dinner together in camp, and eat lunch with the people we are riding with. Today, the truck stopped and put out tomato and cheese sandwiches and ice cream for us all.

We all god a laugh out of today's route map, which looks a lot like the outline of a woman's body. At least, it looks a lot like that to the 23 men that havn't seen their wives or girlfriends since June.

It was a really cold morning again. Heavy headwind too, which cooled us down even more. I didn'y bother with my windbreaker jacket though, because it creates a lot of drag in heavy wind. At lunch, I ditched the windbreaker and put on a bunch of warm clothes. By the time I had finished climbing out of Marathon (the town where we stopped for lunch) I had stripped off all of the warm stuff and was back to my chorts and jearsey. I'd rather be cold than hot when I'm climbing hills.

After Marathon, there was really nothing else until the campsite, other than the Hemlo gold mine, one of the richest gold fields in the world. The road to the Battle mountain mine is called the “Yellow Brick road” because a contractor mistakenly used gold ore instead of gravel to make the road.

We got rained on for a few minutes (my warm stuff didn't help keep me dry at all...I needed the windbreaker) but the sun was out quickly to fry us off.

I was hoping to go for a swim in camp today, but we saw a huge leech in the water when we went down to the beach, and that took the fun out of swimming. Once you've seen a leech in the water, every leaf, reed and pebble that touches you registers as a leech in your mind.

To keep you all updated, Dave is still not back with the group. Jose rejoined the group for the ride into Thunder Bay, but apparently Dave's doctor wanted to give his hip some more healing time. Not sure when he'll rejoin us.

The cell phone coverage up here in Northern Ontario is pretty bad, so these updates are all piling up I'm my outbox waiting to send. Sorry about that. Apparently, the coverage should improve in a few days.
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Daniel Longo
CIBC Corporate Development
(416) 956-3831