2010 Alaska Sunk - Part 5 of 15

2010 Alaska Sunk

Part 5 of 15

Manitoba Horror

More Rain...More, and even More Rain

Flea Bag Motel

Manitoba Horror

I'm going to have some difficulty trying to explain this part of the trip because I'm not sure how to describe something so horrifying that its beyond description.

I had just crossed into Manitoba and the stretch of dual-lane highway from there to the City of Winnipeg is long and boring. It was also raining heavily again and I wasn't in the best of moods. I saw a bend in the highway coming up where there had been an accident of some sort judging by the number of police cars and officers setting up a detour for all of the traffic. We had to wait before the detour around the accident scene was completed and then we were signalled to continue going north on the southbound part of the highway. Visibility wasn't that great. My visor was streaming with water and covered in dead bugs as well. As I passed the accident scene it appeared to me that a very large deer was trying to extricate itself from an open man-hole in the centre of the highway. “How odd?”... I was thinking ...when a dose of cold, cruel reality slapped me in the face. There was no manhole in the road. The deer had been sliced in half by a speeding twenty-two-wheeler truck. I saw its torso lying on the far shoulder of the road in a pool of blood. The collision had resulted in the deer's head, neck and thorax settling in an upright position in the centre of the road with both its front legs forwardly outstretched. Its mouth was still moving slowly as part of the post-mortem trauma. I continued on my journey. After a while, I pulled over to the side of the road where there were a few bushes around to conceal what I had to do. I vomited.

More Rain...More, and even More Rain

To say that things started to go from bad to worse would be a gross understatement. To say that things went from bad to worse to the power of ten might be more realistic. I was watching the sky. It was daunting. All the heavy clouds were moving around in bunches as if I was watching an old motion picture in black and white, mostly black. Gray cumulus clouds were starting to turn dark gray, almost black, and the more I went north, the colder it got. I learned later that the temperature had dropped to 7 degrees Celsius. The rain intensified. Raindrops were hitting the asphalt with such strength and severity that they were bouncing back up twelve inches or more. A smart rider would have pulled over and taken shelter under a bridge or at the nearest gas station but there was nothing to provide any shelter at all for as far as the eye could see. The amount of water that was streaming down my neck; down my front and into my boots must have doubled my body weight. The only positive thing I had going for me was that despite the inclement weather I had made reasonably good distance and I was finally approaching Regina, SASK. I saw a flea-bag motel with a parking lot full of hydro trucks. The old lady had one room left so I took it. What I didn't know, was that today was only the precursor for what I was about to experience tomorrow.

Flea Bag Motel

It didn't have a restaurant. The front door was hard to close properly and the hydro-guys next door were loud and obnoxious. They were drinking a lot and I couldn't really blame them after the inclement weather they'd been exposed to during the day. I went to check out my bed and while I was doing that some small change fell out of my pocket and rolled under the bed. It was then I realized that I had made an error in judgement. This was not a flea bag motel at all. The floor under the bed was just gleaming as if it had just been waxed. The bed was spotless with freshly laundered and starched sheets and I was not able to find a speck of dirt, dust or fluff in the whole place. The title of this paragraph is, consequently, misleading. Nonetheless, I still couldn't sleep. The hydro guys were noisy and loud but even they were getting drowned-out by the incessant roar of the rain that came pelting-down relentlessly during the night; all night long, and into the next day.