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Manitoba floods
I fell sick in Winnipeg and had to be nursed back to health.
I introduce my latest web creation: http://track.adamhooper.com. It tells you where I've been and where I am. As I blog, you'll see improvements on that site.
But enough about me. How about those Manitoba floods? They've been all over the Canadian news lately.
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Epic wind
The sun sets by a wind power generator near Moosomin, Saskatchewan.A tale told each May on cold Prairie days
Is worthy of space on my site.
It's Bicycle rolling down well-ridden roads
And Wind coming, asking to fight.The rider crouched down, with not half a frown,
Requesting the wind to abate.
“I'm too oft due east,” shot Wind, shunning peace,
“This year you'll be trapped and made late.”The ducks flapping east soon flapped without cease;
Wind's gusts spun them 'round with a breeze.
The waves grew white teeth in ditches beneath,
And cans cartwheeled west just to tease. -
Long Run
Nathan Cooper injured his right knee somewhere after the first marathon's worth of his run to Nanaimo this February.
He finished the 70-kilometre run anyway, and he later decided to carry his possessions in a cart rather than a backpack.
When you're running across Canada, you run into unique problems—and you need unique solutions.
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Flat
Flat feels like this: a dull thud-thud.
Your bicycle just bumped over a centimetre-wide crack in the pavement of the Trans-Canada Highway. It might be Alberta or it might be Saskatchewan; the road knows little difference.
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Rockies Road
Today the mountains deserted me. I'm past passes.
And what marvels those passes are.
A flag flaps at the top of Rogers Pass. -
I fell
I crunched from 50 kilometres an hour to zero by means of asphalt.
Whoops, I started with the climax. I'll rewind. The story begins with a block of cheese.
It was Havarti and its price tag said $6.23. It called to me.
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More guts than the slaughterhouse
Hope, B.C. reminded me of Kahama, Tanzania. My first thought as I rolled in was, “this must have been a gold-rush town.”
I was half-right. The B.C. gold rush developed the trading town, a decade after the Hudson Bay Company erected a fur-trade fort there in 1848.
It has the same feel as Kahama. Motels and hotels abound, many with “nice clean rooms,” as advertised by the changeable sign letters competing for your business. It's a gateway town: to the west, you'll find the once gold-rich Fraser River and eventually Vancouver; to the north and east, three highways attack the mountains: the Trans-Canada, the Crow's Nest and the Yellowhead.
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Riding across ridings
As a journalist I ought to be covering the juiciest election stories, but I'm blissfully cycling past them.
Somebody helpfully sprayed arrows to advance polling stations on busy Vancouver sidewalks.The number and size of campaign signs indicate how likely a candidate is to win, for two reasons. First, they're advertisements: ads work, and more ads work more. Second, signs cost money: candidates usually refrain from spending unless they think they've got a shot at the prize.
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West coast trial
A man on a quick bicycle caught up with me.
“Are you training for something?”
My bicycle, a brand-new Long Haul Trucker, was loaded with four paniers. His was naked, tuned for speed. We'd both exited the enormous Centennial Trail in Washington and headed north along an easy road that smelled of springtime and diesel.
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Canucks fever
Canuck fever is all around.
Outside a school on Vancouver Island, this car plugs the owner's preferred team.Some of my readers aren't "real" Canadians (either because they're not Canadian at all or because they're Canadians who don't conform to our national identity as our beer companies define it). For them, let me explain: the Vancouver Canucks is the top-ranked hockey team in the Western Conference this year. It's competing in a best-of-seven series with the team that vanquished it last year, the Chicago Blackhawks. Here's the status today: the Canucks won three in a row, then the Blackhawks won two. One team will soon be eliminated.