Up to North Bay I was right on schedule, so North Bay to Ottawa went very smoothly. The mosquitoes however, were an experience. I had no places aligned to stay between North Bay and Pembroke, so I picked a rest stop that was almost exactly half-way. What the map didn't show was that the stop was right on a large pond, an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. It took about five stages to set up the tent: I'd pull it out and put it down and then run away as fast as I could to lose the mosquitoes. Then run back and do a few more thing.... Finally grab the bag and run inside.

My tent is totally mesh, right almost to the ground. The fly then goes over top of that, right to the ground. Once any mosquitoes get in the fly, they're pretty much stuck there. This photo doesn't come close to doing justice to the number of mosquitoes that were on the tent that evening.

They made two sounds. The typical buzzing, but quite loud because there were hundreds or thousands of them, but also a continuous shhhh noise from trying to buzz around but hitting the fly. I wanted to get a photo then but it was very dark and I was very tired. This is what it was like when I woke up. I guess many of them gave up in the night.

Finding a strategy to get out of the tent that morning is a whole other story. Amazingly, through the whole thing I only got a few bites.

Invisible Children put up an awesome blog post at blog.invisiblechildren.com about my trip!

Here's the full post (or see the original post):

Phil is what Invisible Children is all about. At 18, he’s motivated, globally-minded, confident, and committed to bringing about positive change. Phil, though, is doing a fundraiser we’ve never heard of before here at Invisible Children: He’s balancing his way to bringing in bucks.

For a hefty dose of inspiration, or if you feel like donating some cash to help Phil help students here, head to his website and snoop around.

I've been in touch with the Invisible Children CFO and found out something new: anyone who donated is absolutely eligible for an income-tax receipt, as long as I provide their name/mailing address and amount when I turn the money over to Invisible Children.

I'll be going through the list and if I don't have people's addresses I'll try to contact you to get it. If I don't contact you or you just want to be sure, email me with the info for confirmation.

Thanks to everyone for all the support, in every form. If you haven't yet and can, please donate.

I take an interest in the environment because I live in it. Trying to make choices that reduce my carbon-footprint is one way I try to do my part to maintain it.

Human-powered travel must surely have the least impact right? But moving around requires energy which come from food, so you have to eat more, and food does have a huge environmental impact. I decided to crunch some numbers and find out if I could have reduced the carbon footprint of this trip by taking a bus or other mode of transportation instead of the unicycle.
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Human-Powered Transportation

It all comes down to diet: different foods come from different sources, require different processing and ultimately have very different carbon impacts. I found an interesting chart over at Fat Knowledge republished from the book Food, Energy, and Society(I did the metric conversions so errors there are mine):

As you can see the amount of CO2 for every hundred calories of energy follows a general trend:

Veggies < Animal Products < Red Meat.

Eating lamb produces 571 times more CO2 than soy.

Because meat products produce such large emission, I am a vegetarian (lacto ovo). So how do different diets stack up? Again from Fat Knowledge:

These numbers are based on a 3774 calorie diet which includes wasted food.
3774 cal * 365 days in a year = 1377510 calories per year, divided by the yearly CO2 tons gave the CO2 per calorie column.

Unicycling Across Canada

According to Calorie Count, unicycling burns 340 calories each hour. "Unicycling" is a pretty broad term; usually not applied in the touring sense.
Calorie Count also says that biking 20-23kph burns 544 calories/hour and 23-26 burns 680.

I average just over 20, and unicycling is less efficient than bicycling, so I'll assume 600 calories/ hour.

The total trip distance is about 4700km. At 20kph that means 235 hours of riding.

235 hours at 600 cal/hour means 141 000 calories extra I must consume.

141 000 calories at 88.6gm CO2/100 Cal means a total carbon footprint of 124 926gm CO2

Unicycling Across Canada has a total carbon footprint of 0.12 tonnes CO2

Some Context

I'll get some more numbers up here when I find good sources, eg the footprint of bussing, training, and flying, maybe walking too.

* I don't have a good reference for this yet

Saskatchewan is a wide province, at least after Alberta. Unless something incredibly horrible happens in the next few minutes I'm set to finally get to Manitoba though. I can actually see the sign from here, but I stopped to work out some plans for Winnipeg.

I ended up taking two days off in Regina. The day I wanted to leave I went to the newspaper office for the interview, which was on the way. The headwind was incredible. As it turned out they couldn't do an article that day, they were too busy, but they'd do it the next day.

I don't like taking too many rest days, as it sort of throws me off psychologically, so I really wanted to get going. At the same time though, the point of the trip is to get some awareness for the charity, so it seemed important to get the article.
I checked the weather, and then the decision was easy: 50km/h headwind gusting up to 65.

It was definitely worth the wait. I got a blurb on the front page of the Regina Leader-Post and a good article, plus a video on their website.

Two of some of the coolest things to happen on the trip so far happened in Grenfell. I stopped for lunch at the info centre, and a car pulled up plastered with the logos of a bunch of different newspaper publications. A woman got out and asked to have an interview with me, she'd been sent to find me! That made the first time the media has come looking for me instead of the other way around, it was pretty cool.

After the interview and after I finished eating, a few construction workers pulled up to work on a back deck for the info-centre. We chatted a bit, and one of them knew of, and had actually met "Wobbling" Wally Watts! Wally was the first person to ever unicycle across Canada (1973), and he eventually made it around the world. I knew I would, but that was the first time I ran into someone who knew of him.

The next big stop now is Winnipeg. I've got big plans cooking for that city, so stay tuned. (hint: if you're anywhere near there and own a unicycle or bike or tricycle, shoot me an email).

The photo is of me talking to members of an eight-piece Winnipeg reggae band who stopped to talk, The Subcity Dwellers.