Day 112 August 26, 2011 Middle of Nowhere to Brandon 61km

Why is WiFi so hard to find

It was cooler this morning, a nice change especially now that our A/C is gone. Shortly after I started running this morning (which happened to start at the bottom of a hill, so much for the prairies being flat) hay bales started appearing in the meridian dividing the highway. No longer guarded by fences Mike and I immediately started playing on the first few we saw, taking what we considered fairly artistic photos.

A little while later the same crop duster that I had seen yesterday appeared again and this time I could clearly see that it was crop dusting. It looks like a fairly fun job if you’re a pilot and like flying.

I’ve come up with a new game while I run to help me pass the time. Along this stretch of highway, well pretty much since I entered Manitoba, the fields are swarming with yellow/green butterflies. There are billions of them. My new game involves watching their attempts to cross the highway when vehicles approach. I’ve got the ratio pegged at around 20% of vehicles hit a butterfly as they pass me. That’s not that long a stretch, especially at the speed they’re going at, I only see them for a second or two as they pass. There are so many butterflies that every fifth car hits one. I’ve even figured out the different ways they emerge from collision. There’s the straight shot diagonally when they hit the corner bumper. There’s the straight up and over when they hit the windshield. There’s the straight down when the hit the front bumper. Finally there’s the ‘stick’, where they get caught in the grill.

I made it to Brandon around the 50km mark and finished about 10km West of town. As I was stretching on the side of the road my cousin Jessa came walking over from across the road. She had come to say hi after finishing work. It was fun catching up and answering her questions about the run, which were often focused around roadkill!

We spent much of the rest of the night looking for WiFi to update our sites. We started at Quizno’s but they didn’t have any Internet so we settled for subs instead. Our next stop was McDonalds but their WiFi wasn’t working. It wasn’t a complete loss as I left with a McFlurry. I’m trying to eat ice cream every day if I can. Our third attempt had us hiding in the back parking lot of the Motel 6 and using their Internet but it was patchy and unreliable, even when Mike walked into the lobby and sat down to upload photos. I managed to get the text of three of the blogs up but could only upload one photo. We continued to drive around to a number of other places but all their WiFi spots were password protected. The people of Brandon are so untrusting!

We spent the night at the truck stop in the Husky Station. We were on The National tonight on CBC and a number of people called and text us about it but we weren’t able to get it until just before we went to bed. I think it was really well done, I just wish they had shown our website at the end. It was pretty sweet though to be on national TV.

I didn’t get to sleep until 11pm, so it’s going to be difficult to wake up tomorrow.