Destination unknown...?

[rotor]

Day 26: Goodbye Canadian Shield, hello The Prairies...

Morning is sunny, and unlike yesterday I'm on the way well before 9:00. A look at the map convinced me it would be a smart thing to get west of Winnipeg today, instead of leaving the East-West traverse of it for the morning rush-hour. This means third day of more than 700km. So there is only so many times I want to stop.

This is the first; after all, it marks some level of westward progress:


I know it will be a while before I see my CB1100 in this kind of landscape:


In Kenora, on the shore of the Lake of the Woods:

Despite trying to get to the other side of Winnipeg today, I cant resist passing through the town instead of taking the bypass. Well worth extra half of an hour.

The transition from the Shield to the Prairies on Trans-Canada I always find fascinating. From the Ontario-Manitoba border the landscape flattens, but for a while it is still unmistakeably the Shield: granite, forest, water... Then in a space of just a kilometre or so, right before the intersection with Manitoba 12 - one find himself in the the Prairies, with full knowledge that from this point on, right until one hits the Rockies thousands of kilometres away, nothing will look any different from what one is looking at now.

At 18:00 or so, I am west of Winnipeg, if only enough to know that I wont be affected by the morning traffic into it.