I’ve lost a lot of weight on this walk, about ten kilos (22 pounds).
I start my morning off today like every morning since I noticed I had lost a lot of weight – with a concoction made of a scoop of Vega, a scoop of protein powder, and water.
I have to psych myself up in order to choke this concoction down.
It’s really disgusting.
Not disgusting like brussel sprouts or finding a dead newt in your pocket.
But disgusting enough.
The powder never fully dissolves in the water, so there are always a few bits floating on top.
I drink the whole cup in one shot, pour a bit of water in the cup to rinse it out, and then drink the rinse water too.
Blecchh.
I follow it up this morning with a butter tart with pecans, which is the opposite of disgusting.
Eating a butter tart is like eating a little miracle.
Not a miracle like being able to turn gold into something more valuable like, say, cookies, but a miracle nevertheless.
The taste buds wonder if they have just died and gone to taste-bud heaven.
I stop at a grocery store in Bruce Mines, a town famous for being the location of Canada’s first copper mine.
A local woman, about sixty-years-old, born on the dining room table of her home and still living in the same house, chats me up.
She says that highway 17 is extremely dangerous, which I know to be true.
“You must have done research on the high volume of deaths of cyclists and pedestrians on this highway,” she says.
Well, no actually.
The only research I did was to pull out a map of Canada and draw a line from Halifax to Vancouver.
The bugs have been terrible, but the woman tells me the bugs will get worse.
“Wawa is the worst area. People have literally been killed by swarms of bugs in the Wawa area,” she says. “You have to be careful.”
Hmm, I guess the Wawa Tourist Committee left this little tidbit of information out of their highway advertisements.
Personally, thinking of all the ways a human could die, I would prefer that I wasn’t killed by a swarm of bugs.
Although it would be a very Canadian way to die.
