Day 12 – Cluny, AB (May 13, 2014)
I packed up at the hostel in Calgary and was on the road a little before 7am. Apparently the hostel served breakfast at 7:30am as part of the cost of the room. It would have been nice to take advantage but I find the continental type breakfast insufficient (waiting 40 minutes translates to too long) and I wanted to get started.
Eventually I had my breakfast at a retro Harley Davidson place and ordered the breakfast staple, “Pain dore”. Katie would appreciate it.
After breakfast I weaved my way through the bicycle trails that followed along a dyke of one of the canals.
When I left Calgary the wind started to pick up from the East by South East I as predicted. I knew that if the wind continued I was going to have a hard time making Bassano.
As the hours wore on working against the 20 km head wind a number of things occurred to me.
- There is this ‘stinking’ effect somebody came up with. I think it was Beroulli or some other sick person. Basically it says that the air travels faster over a hill. I’d like to tear that out of the text books.
- Truck drivers are too nice in Alberta. Imagine this: I get this huge shoulder lane all to myself on the transcanada. Along comes a truck pushing air and the drivers, thinking they are doing me a favour, pull over the passing lane increasing the distance between the truck and me to about 30 feet.
As the day wore on making it to Bassano became a bigger and bigger obstacle. At the first sign of a gas station I stopped and bought some chocolate bars and beef jerkey – no real food.
In Cluny, about 50km from Bassano, at about 4pm, I decided to call it a day.
The was a gas station at the corner at the trancanada. A restaurant was advertised but the restaurant area was cordoned off. It looked like it had been that way for years. The lady at the counter explained there was place to eat at Pete’s Cafe in Cluny “just down the hill”. That worried me since hills in the prairies are up to 5km long but I took the risk.
The population of Cluny was around one hundred. Pete’s Cafe and Bakery was in the center of the town. I was served by a friendly girl in her 30s who scurried about with a low center of gravity. Another lady came by explaining I could camp down the road and wouldn’t be charged. She was a kind magnanimous person who seemed to run things. She could well have been Cluny’s mayor (or should have been.)
After chatting with some local guys about bikes I settled in for the night in an open field by a baseball diamond (the town camp site.)
