31 August – 1 September 2026 · Moosomin, Saskatchewan → Winnipeg → San Salvador
I was at the Tim Hortons in Moosomin at 23:30, eighty minutes before a bus that wasn't due until 00:50. There was no reason for it except one: we were not missing this bus. Ten months and six countries were riding on a FlixBus out of a prairie town at midnight, and I wasn't going to be the guy standing on the shoulder watching taillights.
Good thing, too. The coach came in at 00:10 and pulled out at 00:35 — a full fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. Nobody announces that at a rural flag stop. There's no gate, no terminal, no boarding call. The driver counts heads and goes, and the printed time on your ticket is the latest it might leave, not the earliest. If you take one thing from this entry for your own trip: be early anywhere a bus is picking you up off a shoulder, because "on time" is not a promise out here.
The ride itself was fine. Six hours to Winnipeg, some sleep banked, one guy near the front playing a podcast out loud like the rest of the bus had asked for it. We rolled into the Grey Wolf Terminal on Sherbrook Street right on time, and I grabbed a twelve-dollar Uber out to the airport.
Breakfast at Stella's, inside Winnipeg Richardson, deserves its own paragraph. French omelette, and genuinely the best mushrooms I've had in a long while — properly cooked, not the grey rubber you brace for at an airport counter. The server was the first bright thing about a very long morning: polite, quick, the kind of cheerful that doesn't feel performed after you've been awake for the better part of a day. She told me straight out she was going on break, which is the right way to do it, and the service did dip while she was gone — not her fault, that's a floor-coverage problem. Hash browns were good but oversalted, the one mark against an otherwise great plate. Twenty-nine dollars, and worth it. Most places at an airport don't even try; this one did.
Then the day fell apart in the ordinary way travel days fall apart. My connecting flight to San Salvador, through Toronto, got delayed at the gate, and by the time we were meant to land in Toronto there wasn't enough runway left to make the connection. It was cancelled outright — after a maintenance delay — somewhere around thirty hours since I'd last slept properly. Air Canada put me up in a hotel in Winnipeg for the night and rebooked me for the next morning with a longer gap this time, so there wasn't a repeat. Say what you want about a day like that; the people at the counter were good to me the whole way through it.
So San Salvador came a day late. Thirty-eight hours, two countries, one cancelled flight - and then an arrival that could not have been easier, smoother or more pleasant than it was. Customs and immigration were the best part of the whole day. Then warm air and a ride to the coast.
Ledger: Uber, Grey Wolf Terminal to Winnipeg Richardson — CA$12.00. Breakfast at Stella's — CA$29.00. Local eSIM, bought the night before boarding — CA$8.00.