I am sitting at a table inside the Boston Pizza in Moose Jaw drinking Great Western beer with a woman named Patti. On the flat screen TV game one of the Stanley Cup finals is about to begin, and we are glad to be sitting and drinking. Outside a mist is falling, leaving little beads of water on our tents at a campground that’s a ten minute drive from the restaurant.

Patti and I first met hours earlier at the River Park Campground when I noticed her orange tent on the grass and bicycle locked to a nearby tree.

“Excuse, but are you biking across the country?” I asked as I approached her camp, the only other tent at the grounds other than my own little grey one.

She said yes, she was. So I asked her what direction she was headed. She said east.

“I just got it in my head,” she answered when I asked her what motivated her, a mother of two, to take a three month break from her job on Vancouver Island to go on the trip of a lifetime.

We swapped stories standing there by her tent, and she told me of how she left Mile 0 in Vancouver Island May 1. Crossed B.C. Then coasted down the Rockies and sailed through Alberta with the wind at her back, only to be slowed by the strong east-west winds in Saskatchewan.

I told her about my drive so far, of how I zigzagged out of B.C., then crisscrossed across Alberta seeing the sights from Vulcan to Lake Louise then Edmonton and Northern Alberta then south to the Badlands.

We were both travellers excited about the roads we had past and those we were about to go down, but we were also desperate to know more about the playoffs. So it was off to a place we were sure would play the game, where we ordered a bottle of Great Western each and a couple big meals.