Day 4 - Sept 5th, 2008 - 433kms Raymond AB, to Consul SK.
What a day.
So it started of just GREAT! We were up and eager to hit the road. Donna was ever so nice and even packed us lunches for the road. We had been invited to go the the golf course in Raymond for breakfast . So we had a delicious filling breakfast. Neither of us wanted to leave Raymond! "Everybody Loves Raymond" came to mind.
We hit the road heading east and made it to Manyberries before the rear tire became a concern. It was wearing out really quickly, much quicker than I had hoped. We wouldn't be able to make it and needed to get these tires changed. Turned out Medicine Hat was the closest place with the tires. So we headed North. After 2 hours of driving on the worst road ever, we made it. The guys at the Yamaha place had a good laugh at what we were doing but managed to throw on some new tires, do a quick oil change and get us on our way, $180 lighter, but feeling safer.
We headed out of Medicine Hat on the TransCanada #1 Hwy and took the 41 down through Cypress Hills. 41 turned out to be a good 2 hours of driving, and we saw barely any other traffic on the road. Coming up a steep hill in Cypress Hills Keri freaked out saying "oh my god, oh my god!" She was pointing to a huge light brown animal at the side of the road in the bush. In a car this wouldn't be scary. But alone on a road, travelling at about 15km/hr on a scooter, this freaked me out! I prepared for the worst, a hungry Grizzly bear. I decided to try and putt putt past it and hope to not startle it. Then it moved and we saw its face! A cows face!? And then we spotted more. To think a cow could have scared us that badly!
We went south on the 41 to the 501. On our map it showed as being a gravel road until the Sask border and then switching to a nice road. So with the sun setting we headed out on this road. What a mistake that was.
It got dark very quickly, the gravel road was just awful to drive on. I put my feet down a couple times as we came very close to wiping out. Keri grabbed me suddenly and shouted to look out as a herd of cows came into the headlight of the scooter. There were cows all over the road and they weren't moving! I honked and shouted and we ended up having to weave in and out of them. But we were still optimistic as the border wasn't that far away. We saw the border sign and to our horror the road continued to be deep gravel. To make matter EVEN worse it started to rain, and the gas gauge was sitting on empty.
I really needed to gas up, but neither one of us wanted to stop in the complete darkness and turn off the scooter and throw gas in completly blind. (We had no flashlight!). Keri had started to cry behind me from the fear of being all alone in the dark. I tried to stay strong but according to my map we should have come across at least a couple of towns by now. So we stopped, left the scooter running and checked the map under the headlight. Keri swore she had seen a 615 sign a ways back at a y intersection. If we were on the 615, I wouldn't have enough gas even in the spare tank to make it to a town. About to turn back we spotted some sort of light in the distance. I was sure it was just a street light, but Keri said it was approaching. We waited a good 10 minutes before we saw it was a vehicle. I managed to flash my lights and flag him down for help. It turns out, if we had turned around we would have been royally screwed. Our destination was about 10 miles away over a small hill(which was why we never saw any lights). We pulled into town and decided we had earned a night in a motel.
The scooter is VERY dirty, we're VERY tired, the bed is VERY comfy.