This morning dawned cool damp and breezy. Not as windy as the last two days but still a moderate headwind. Lynne suggested breakfast at the Chicken Chef instead of porridge in camp and she got no argument from me! We were still undecided as to our route to Kamsack so I asked some of the local farmers having coffee their opinion of some of the gravel roads we were considering. Their response was an emphatic “NO”! They said that the RM had gone crazy with gravelling this summer and most of roads on the Manitoba side of the river were tough to drive on, let cycle on. (They agreed with us!) So we took highway #5 west across the Assiniboine Valley and took a couple of backroads that connected with the Togo Grid heading north across the Assiniboine Valley again. About 4kms south of Togo we spotted a suspicious black creature crossing the road about 300 meters ahead. It walked into the trees lining the ditch and we waited to see if it would continue westward. Having not seen it for a few minutes we began to proceed. We saw it along the field margin and I got a couple of pics before it disappeared again All of a sudden a large bear stood up on the field margin about 150 meters away looking directly toward us and it began moving directly toward us. It approached to within 100 meters while I quickly attached a banger to the launcher. It didn’t seem aggressive, more curious but we were taking no chances, a shot in its direction and it barreled into the field at high speed, not to be seen again. We rode on into Togo where we were surprised to find a restaurant, the Silver Thread where we both had second breakfasts! 😁 We stopped at the Stone House to check it out and headed on. The wind was still strong enough to push us around a bit on the looser surfaces so we rode on and off pavement the rest of the way to Kamsack.