Day One: Wobbly

Wobbling Along

Day one, as with any adventure, actually starts way ahead of time.

I had spent about a month planning our gear, route and food. I tested equipment, changed our set up a few times and tried to find the best one for our trip. But there were limitations—time, finances, the size of my bike and the simple fact that we were trying to carry everything we needed for two people on a bike and a trail-along.

By the time departure day arrived, I thought we had most of it figured out.

We did not.

Our biggest problem that first morning was getting the rear pannier rack to work on the trail-along. We thought it would fit, but it kept rubbing on the back tire. We also discovered that our fully loaded rig was difficult for my Dee to get onto comfortably.

And it was wobbly.

Very wobbly.

She was nervous about it from the beginning.

This would become something of a theme for our trip: wobbly.

After some last-minute fixes and a lot of adjusting the weight between the front and back of the bike, we finally left around noon.

We made it about a block before we fell.

Dee was already nervous about how unbalanced everything felt, and we went down pretty hard. There were tears. There were bandages. There was coaxing. And there were a few minutes when getting back on the bike didn’t seem particularly appealing.

Luckily, it was a beautiful day and she wanted to bike.

Getting Out of Saskatoon

We couldn’t have asked for better weather for our first day. We got onto the Meewasin Trail and planned to follow it all the way toward the road to Wanuskewin. We followed our bike map app, but they didn’t take into consideration one important factor.

Construction.

What should have been a straightforward ride became an adventure just trying to leave the city.

Twenty-five years ago, when I biked across Canada, a big lesson I learned was that biking into and out of cities was often harder than biking the long stretches between them. There is rarely an easy way in or out for a bicycle.

Apparently, that hasn’t changed much.

At one point, we literally had to carry our bike—and all of our gear—over piles of dirt and rocks. My bike cleats filled with mud and had to be cleaned out.

Twice.

But eventually our struggle was rewarded with something glorious:

A wide-open road.

For a few kilometres, anyway. It was really special. Anyone who bikes regularly knows how rare and beautiful a wide empty road is.

“We’re Here Right Now”

I had purposely made our first day short and straight-forward.

I knew we would need time to figure things out. I also knew ourselves well enough to know that we are not morning people. I had been up late the night before, and we were both tired before we even started.

So when we pulled up to Wanuskewin Heritage Park, I was very happy for the break. It was hot and I needed some shade, water and snacks.

Dee thought the centre was really cool. For me, it felt like the beginning of another part of our adventure—exploring our Indigenous heritage along the route.

Wanuskewin, the nēhiyawēwin (Plains Cree) word roughly translated as ‘seeking peace of mind’ has been a sacred site and gathering place for more than 6,400 years

It felt important that we stop at this spot for a little bit of peace. We looked around a little but didn’t do a full tour.

At one point I said, “We should come here sometime.”

My beautiful, brilliant daughter looked at me and said something profound:

“We’re here right now.”

It made me pause.

I spend so much time thinking about what we’re going to do next—the next trip, the next destination, the next plan—that sometimes I need the reminder.

We’re here right now.

Enjoy this moment.

And then the next one.

Our First Gravel Experience

After Wanuskewin, our support person turned around and we were on our own. I felt nervous and a bit wobbly myself.

We got our first real taste of gravel on the way toward Warman. It was a relatively busy grid road, and we had to pull over several times to let vehicles pass. It seemed odd that it was so busy, but the reason became apparent.

Our lack of practice getting on and off the heavily loaded bike before leaving quickly became apparent. Our practice happened on the road.

Wobbly.

Along the road we were riding we passed a cute little ice cream stand, the Twin Peaks Creamery. It was the kind of place that 22-year-old me, biking across Canada, would have stopped at in a heartbeat.

Alas, lactose intolerance has made spontaneous roadside frozen treats considerably less enticing. I was jealous of all the cars going for their ice cream fix.

So we rode on by.

One Big Road

We followed our map toward Warman until we reached something I had been thinking about ahead of time: a VERY busy divided highway.

I explained the plan to Dee:

“When Mommy bikes and yells GO, you pedal as hard as you can. When Mommy yells STOP, you stop pedaling.”

It was simple, but I was so worried.

My heart was racing.

“GO!”

As the cars whizzed by at 130 km per hour, we pedaled hard.

“STOP!”

We stopped in the middle.

“GO!”

And just like that, we were safely across.

Whew!

We had made it to Warman.

Joy is the Most Important Part

Our campground was surrounded by a cute little park. Of course the moment we stopped, Dee wanted to play. She wanted to run over all sweaty in our bike clothes and play.

I tried to reason with her.

“First, let’s eat. Aren’t you hungry? Let’s get our tent set up then we can go.”

It was a no-go.

But there was lots of daylight left and I wanted to give her something she wanted to do.

So we changed our clothes and rinsed off, grabbed a bunch of snacks and went to the playground.

I sat in the shade on the grass, eating and recovering, while she ran around the playground with a bunch of local kiddos. She even made a friend! She went from the swings to the slide to the monkey bars.

It was clear I had done most of the heavy lifting that day.

Over the roughly 18 hours we spent in Warman, Dee returned to that playground about 5 times. It was one of the highlights of her trip. Another was cookies, but I’ll get to that.

Spoiler alert: the biking didn’t make the top three.

That evening we had a full shower, crawled into our tent and did some journaling before bed.

Expectedly, our first day hadn’t gone as smoothly as I had hoped:

The rack didn’t work properly and had to be adjusted a few times. The bike was wobbly. We fell. Construction sent us scrambling over dirt piles. We got covered in mud. We negotiated gravel roads and crossed a scary highway.

And somewhere in between all of that, we sat in the shade, played at a playground and learned something worth remembering:

We’re here right now.

Then we slept like logs.