O, Canada

Waking up only a couple hundred meters west of the Saskatchewan / Alberta  border, I had a long haul across Alberta and well into British Columbia on Monday. It confirmed another thing I suspected about Western Canada, knowing it was true for the Western United States. You can pretty much tell what longitude you're at by the geography. 105 degrees west looks like 105 west regardless of how far north or south you are. The American Southwest is a desert and red, and Montana is green, but the features are the same. There are no hoodoos in Alberta that I'm aware of, but again you know where you are. 

This is also big oil country. Edmonton is a huge refining and distribution hub; its towers of steel and glass are built from the liquid gold. Cattle on the top and dinosaurs underneath.

Oh, I got stopped for going 117 in a 60, which has never happened to me before. Even when you convert it down from kilometers, 72 in a 40 sounds like a lot.

The rub is kind of it was 110 mph freeway, with a car stopped on the shoulder for assistance. The law is in that situation, any flashing light, slow to 60. Well, there were two Mounties, and one of them wasn't there to help at all.

He actually gave me a warning for two reasons, the first being that this limit is different between provinces, and it should be displayed on a sign which I could have missed. Second, The ticket would have been over $800! I was super polite and was a good boy from there on out.

The other rub is that I had just gotten done passing a guy on an adventure bike similar to mine. And he must have gotten a good laugh out of it. Oh look at this guy going like hell. Oh look at this idiot getting pulled over.

The wind at the end of this leg was stiff, and relentless. When it started to rain pretty good, the wind was blowing the slipstream from southbound trucks across the 2-lane highway, leaving me to crash through walls of water. That wasn't the most fun. But, it builds character. 

I was in Max Hydro mode, which with this new setup means all ankles and wrists cinched up tight, full gauntlet gloves, and the neck sock over the collar of the jacket, with the jacket zipped to the pants and all vents zipped shut. I had hit rain since early on, and while the suit is watertight, I have had incursions when not fully hunkered down. The equipment was wet at a pee stop in Indiana, and if you're a long-time reader, you know how much I hate soggy balls.

Even in magic future time as I write this a week later, I have still not been in a hammering rain for any length of time. So, yeah, TBD. I did run smack into this scene the day before, and stopped to engage Max Hydro Mode.  There were lightning bolts blasting out of there and the whole 9 yards. Normally that's a deal breaker for me, but I had places to be and, really, how often do you actually hear about Honda riders being struck by lightning?

Much to my relief, the corner of it that I clipped was no big deal. Onward.