While our nuclear clan has pumped out two generations of nothing but boys, the Riddell/Granger family is like Noah, rolling kids out two-by-two in equal-opportunity fashion.

After a long, wet journey Saturday, Clive and I landed in Warren, Man., on the doorstep of one of our many second cousins, Barb Riddell and her husband Tom. Barb grew up a Granger with her brother Stu, who I miss greatly having gotten to know him in the last few years before he passed away.

(As an aside, I’ve been to one Brandon Wheat Kings game since Stu’s death and struggled to watch because I couldn’t keep my mind off him working the Wheaties games as a minor official. I haven’t been back since even though I’ve been around every April and the team is frequently playing host to a WHL playoff game.)

Barb says their mother Mamie, another Granger I miss dearly, also grew up in a one-boy, one-girl family. Barb married Tom, a local lad. Guess what? You’re right. He had one sister, who has a son and a daughter.

So Barb and Tom weren’t about to break the tradition with their offspring Craig and Kyla. They’ve done their part, too, Kyla and her husband Scott have a son Ethan, 9, and daughter Madison, 6, while Craig and Colleen are proud parents of daughter, Maria, 7, and son Hayden, 4.

But despite this odd anomaly, Barb was caught off guard when a friend said to her four years ago, “So I take it you knew Hayden was going to be a boy.”

“Huh?” she replied. “Well yes, but what do you mean?”

The friend then pointed out the equal-opportunity reproduction pattern.

“I guess I just presumed [Hayden] would be a boy,” says Barb. “I had not thought of it until Hayden was born that that was the pattern.’

There are couples all over the world who try to manipulate the chromosome gender lottery, or at least cross their fingers, hoping to have one child of each gender. For this family, it just comes naturally.

What also comes naturally is Barb’s friendly and jovial attitude, and Tom’s genial manner. While I lived in Winnipeg (1989-2001), they kindly invited me to many Christmas dinners (almost always in frighteningly, frigid conditions).

Barb and Tom’s wedding in 1968 was probably the first nuptials the four Granger brothers ever attended. It was the highlight of our quadrennial prairie family vacation. We scampered back and forth between the church, the home of Charlie and Mamie, and the grain elevator Charlie ran in Warren.

Cousin Marg manned the guest book which myself, Owen and Ian signed. But Clive balked. He was nine and the pen intimidated him. Turns out he’d only been allowed to use a pencil in school. Despite Marg’s urging he wouldn’t do it. Bizarrely enough, Clive remembered the incident. Barb laughed when she heard the story. Sure enough, Barb looked in the book and his signature was nowhere to be seen, although expecting a nine-year-old to have a signature might be a bit of a stretch. He corrected his transgression before we left Sunday morning by signing nearly 48 years after the fact!

While raising Craig and Kyla, Barb taught at Bobby Bend elementary in Stonewall while Tom made the daily, long journey into southwest Winnipeg to his job running a package printing press.

For both, though, Warren was home. The peace and quiet and familial connections were just too strong. They still are.

Craig lives and works just a couple of blocks down a pock-marked, gravel road. Kyla has just joined forces with two other colleagues to open Quarry Ridge Pharmacy in Stonewall, although she’s still working at a Shoppers Drug Mart in northwest Winnipeg.

Craig runs a 3,000-acre seed farm that is quite the growing business (pun, of course, intended). He took Clive and I on a tour after dinner Saturday. It’s just a 50-metre walk down a path through the trees from his home to the Riddell Farm Enterprises Ltd.

There are bins, farming equipment and cleaning equipment, and more cleaning equipment, everywhere. The operation is extremely impressive in its scope and its success. However, there’s no truth to the rumour the seeds are loaded two-by-two before shipment.

What shocks me about Barb and Tom is she will turn the big 7-0 in 2016 while Tom already reached that mark two years ago. They’re both very active and agile. They’re a delight to deal with and talk to.

They were extremely generous to us in the hospitality and help they provided to us. They didn’t discriminate just because we were two brothers, and not siblings of each gender.

• Clive and I left Marg and Bob in Onanole on Friday. We took their advice to use Mountain Road to connect from Highway 10 to Hwy 5. It was a good idea because the busy Hwy 10 from Riding Mountain National Park to well south of Minnedosa is rough and lacks a shoulder.

Mountain Road (which to us B.C. boys is bit of moniker hyperbole because if that’s a mountain then I’m George Clooney’s doppleganger) doesn’t have a shoulder but it does have next-to-no traffic with nice rolling scenery. Hwy 5 was smooth asphalt with less traffic than 10. We also had a wind at our back as we rolled into Neepawa.

We arrived in Gladstone in mid-afternoon having already gone more than 115 kilometres. We contemplated picking up some food for dinner and going another 30 km to Westbourne gambling that town would have a campground. We were advised there wasn’t (although we may have had bad intelligence) so we decided to stay. 

We struggled to start Clive’s little cooker because of the wind and the wet wood but eventually made a pasta jambalaya which included smokies purchased from Jarvis Meats and Abattoir. The best part of the stay was breakfast the next morning at the Gladstone Bakery and Eatery. It had good bread, good pastries, good cooking, good coffee and Robin’s Donuts furniture hand-me-downs. Clive bemoaned the fact his hometown of Williams Lake, which services more than 20,000, doesn’t have its own bakery while this little town had a gem of one.

But after the sumptuous breakfast, we got hit with rain en route to Westbourne. After that it was an easy roll into Portage la Prairie. We then broke off Highway 1 to take Hwy 26 to avoid the freeway-like Trans-Canada. While it had little traffic it was a rough road. A very, very rough road. Another battle with a north headwind on Hwy 458 and then as a crosswind on 227 and we finally arrived worn out and weathered from a 137-km ride.

• The hardest I’ve pedalled all trip just may have come during that northbound stretch, but it wasn’t because of the wind. I was riding parallel to a sheep farm and saw a beautiful white dog chasing me along the fence. No worries, right. Well all of a sudden he ducked underneath the barbed wire and sprinted across the overgrown grass gully hell bent on getting after me. I pedalled like crazy to reach 24-km/h – until then that day I had struggled to maintain an 18-km/h pace – before the dog gave up. I have encountered a bear, bighorn sheep and elk on this trip but that canine scared the bejeezus out of me. 

• Despite the rough road, Highway 26 is picturesque with plenty of beautiful fields of rich soil where crops are already coming up. I thought maybe it was the rain that made the dirt so dark, but Craig says that area is rated as the best farming soil in Manitoba.

With such large homesteads along the route, we must have seen about eight people cutting their large-expanse lawns with riding mowers in the space of a few hours. When we reached Warren we saw two homeowners cutting their grass the conventional way. As we turned into Bob and Tom’s street, I turned to Clive and said, “It’s nice to see someone actually pushing a mower instead of riding it.”

Well, up from behind the bushes of the house on the corner popped up a woman in her golden years getting ready to start her mower who declared, “Yes, I do it to get some exercise.” I hadn’t even seen her, but she was the third in the block. She then asked where we had biked from, and we told her Gladstone. She replied, “You must be the Grangers.” 

Whoa! Talk about a small town. It turns out the woman gets more exercise than mowing. She was Barb’s regular walking partner and she knew all about us.

• We are visiting my old Winnipeg stomping grounds awaiting the arrival of Brody. Clive’s son feels his knee is strong enough to give it a go keeping up with us so he’s taking the train from St. Albert, Alta., where he’s been staying at the home of his Uncle Brian and Aunt Ruth Menegozzo. He’s expected to arrive Tuesday night so on Wednesday we’ll head toward our next challenge, Northern Ontario.

KILOMETRE COUNT

Day 28: Onanole to Gladstone 118 km Total (22 days riding): 2,501*

Day 29: Gladstone to Warren 137 km; Total  2640

Day 30: Warren to St. Vital 67 km; Total 2708

* Some farting-around-town kilometres, although far from all, included in total.