May 25, 2011 by Rae

A Saskatchewan Education, Or Not So Humble Humboldt

This past weekend, I joined Gary and Jody on a road trip to visit some members of Gary’s family who live near the small town of Humboldt, SK, which is a little under two hours north-eastish of Saskatoon.

Gary and Jody have done this trip many times and know the Saskatchewan road quality, or lack thereof, very well. So, they decided that the less bumpy way to get there would be going through Swift Current, Moose Jaw, and skirting Regina, and we would come home by way of Saskatoon and Moose Jaw.

Mid-afternoon Friday I loaded my stuff into my car and headed to Jody’s workplace. There, I moved my gear to her car and we took off for Gary’s workplace. There, we loaded up their rig, a 20′ travel trailer and truck, and headed east. We were on the road towards Medicine Hat by about 6PM.

The drive to the Saskatchwan border was pretty uneventful. I looked forward to doing the bit between Medicine Hat and Moose Jaw on the TransCanada since that was the only section of it I haven’t done, except for whatever’s in Newfoundland. I have to say that south-east Alberta looks a lot like southwest Saskatchewan. 🙂

Back to Saskatchewan!

Jody ran the deli Friday night and I was so hungry by that point that I didn’t think to photograph my dinner until I was halfway through:

the remains of my Friday dinner

It was coming onto 9PM when we hit Swift Current, and Gary was beat, so we pulled into the Walmart for the night.

Jody made up for the previous night’s late dinner with this breakfast:

breakfast Saturday!

Complemented by oranges, coffee, and yoghurt. I have been well fed since landing in Lethbridge! 😀

Gary and Jody’s rig; much shorter than mine!

We pushed on eastward through Moose Jaw, the Qu’Appelle valley, and then we skirted around Regina before heading north. The roads were so bad I thought we would be launched into orbit!

I was put on deli duty and discovered that is not easy to make a sandwich in a moving vehicle. Notice how smooshed my lunch is:

lunch Saturday (made by me!)

We passed through the town of Engelfeld, which hosts an annual pig roast to raise money for charity.

the Englefeld pig

I really enjoyed this drive; there is just something about the Prairies that awes me.

We arrived in Humboldt in late afternoon where I was introduced to my hosts and was settled into a guest bedroom. We were served a very yummy dinner and then my hosts took us out to see the sights. I think that might actually have been more for my benefit. I’m very thankful!

The first thing we saw were pelicans! I had no idea you could find pelicans this far north! Unfortunately, they were super off in the distance and even my trusty zoom wasn’t able to get a good shot of one.

pelicans!

We then went to Waldsea Lake. Saskatchewan has been very wet the last few years and there has been a lot of problems with flooding and rising waters. So, this lake, which used to have a nice day use area and lots of cottages around it, was allowed to spill out from its berm. The cottages were all moved to a temporary holding area and will be relocated. The road to the lake just… ends.

Waldsea Lake

cottages pulled from the shores of Waldsea Lake

We then drove around Humboldt a bit so I could get a feel for the layout, seeing some of the major stores, the schools, hospitals, etc. The town is almost full-service and has a population of 6,000.

Before heading back, our hosts pulled into the drive-thru at McDonalds to treat everyone to shakes. This drive-thru has to be unique since it has an alley cutting right through it!

We ended the evening with a dice game that was very quick to learn. Beginner’s luck was not with me!

I was the first one up Sunday morning and I took the time to get some work done. I had internet through my USB modem, but it was a very sloooow connection. It seems like Dawson City has better cell coverage than does rural Saskatchewan!

Once we were all up we had a HUGE brunch. I didn’t even want to think about food until early evening!

The afternoon was a bit lazy and I caught up on my reading.

Late afternoon, friends and family showed up for a bonfire and wiener roast. What a perfect day for that; we’d hit the mid 20s, with sunshine!

Before dinner, I was taught how to play a gruesome Saskatchewanese game of Russian origin called Bunnock, or Bones. Originally played with horse hooves, this cross between bowling and curling is now often played with plastic bone replicas. I was quite good!

After that, a little boy wanted me to go with him to check out the barn cat’s hideout. There, he discovered tiny kittens no more than a couple of weeks old. They were so cute; no bigger than a mouse, with eyes still shut.

For dinner, I learned how to roast hot dogs over an open fire. Or, rather, how not to. The first one was a tad burnt. 😀 I also enjoyed some burnt marshmallows, but that was on purpose. Marshmallows just aren’t worth eating if they haven’t been set on fire first.

We ended the night chatting around a campfire. One person showed up with a mini marshmallow thrower and I got to learn how to use that. I was a natural, hitting my target (Gary) with my one and only attempt.

The evening wound up around 11. Everyone seemed intent on sleeping in Monday, so I stayed up late to finish a book. Of course, everyone else changed their mind and I was the last one up!

Our hosts live on remote lake-side acreage that is partially flooded right now. Access to the house is through a narrow causeway. When Gary awoke to rain, he was worried we’d get flooded out, so that propelled the early start to the day.

my hosts’ causeway

We were fed another ginormous brunch and then it was time to hit the road, sometime in mid-morning. We drove straight through to Gary’s workplace, stopping only to get fuel and use the bathroom. We were all stuffed from breakfast and only lightly snacked all day.

This was an awesome weekend. Thank you!

LOTS more pictures below!

driving over the edge of the world?

Yup, the earth is definitely flat!

Back to Saskatchewan!

the remains of my Friday dinner

Saskatchewan sunset

breakfast Saturday!

Gary and Jody’s rig; much shorter than mine!

weird 5er seen in Swift Current

Jody made me believe that’s snow. It’s actually salt!

more salt

entering Moose Jaw

the Moose Jaw moose

lunch Saturday (made by me!)

Qu’Appelle valley

the Englefeld pig

Englefeld

driving over a causeway; there wasn’t always water on both sides

pelicans!

pelicans! (just squint)

dramatic sky

Waldsea Lake

cottages pulled from the shores of Waldsea Lake

caboose in Humboldt

Humboldt cemetery

Humboldt Elementary School (looks like an insane asylum)

dramatic sky

home of the local plumber, who apparently charges $10,000 for a toilet 🙂

dramatic sky

my hosts’ causeway

geese on the road

fog over water

driving into the mist

in the mist

still in the mist

Saskatoon

Toon Town Tavern

approaching Swift Current

September 21, 2008 by Rae

Saskatoon

I wish I had time to share all the pictures I took of Saskatoon, but I have to be out of this site by 11! 🙁 Every other place I’ve stayed, checkout has been a much more civilized 12 o’clock.

At any rate, let me take you back to Regina one last time, to the set of ‘Laundry Day On the Prairie’.

Even though I haven’t blogged about it since I bought it, I’ve been using and absolutely adore my Wonderwash. I use it to keep on top of the cleaning of small items like dish cloths. The machine cleans things beautifully. I should have taken a before and after picture of one of the cloths I cleaned; it was so filthy after washing a BBQ grill that I thought it would have to become a rag. My Wonderwash got it back to brilliant white! At any rate, I woke up Thursday to discover that Ms. Tabitha had been sick all over the bed. Yay. Not. I decided to wash the sheets in the Wonderwash. This was not as tedious an endeavour as one might imagine even though it took about an hour. The sun was shining so hard that I barely had to wring anything out; within an hour everything was bone dry.

The owners came by at one point because someone had told them that a tenant had strung a clothesline, an apparent no no. They laughed when they saw I’d strung the line from one of Miranda’s mirrors to a utility pole. That was fine; the no no is to string a heavy line between their precious tiny poplars. I can’t believe that I can believe that some idiots would have done that. Me, I’m good at improvising. 🙂

Croft will be happy to see a white hose in this picture. I had to use my green hose for black tank related matters back in Manitoba, so since I needed a new hose anyway, I made it a point to look for a white one. I hate it, it leaks at the connection where it screws to the tap and Canadian Tire won’t take it back. I’ll have to fix it next time I stop; thankfully I have the parts to do that.

So, Saskatoon. I’m going to have to move here since it hosts my dream home!

I decided that the only thing I absolutely had to do in Saskatoon was the Western Development Museum’s ‘1910 Boomtown’.

It’s fantastic!!! The museum is a recreation of a street in a circa 1910 Saskatchewan town.

You can go into each building and see a typical commerce, service, or home from the period.

That took up the entire morning. As I was coming out, the lady at the admissions counter ‘had’ to introduce me to her other colleague as ‘the gal RVing across Canada with her two cats.’ Without prompting, she then told me I had to visit the University of Saskatchewan campus and pulled out a map showing me a walking route I could take. That sounded fantastic. I needed the exercise and I wasn’t in the mood for more museums.

The walk was quite long, about 7.5km, if I reckon correctly, and was breathtaking. I started at the Saskatoon Weir (dam) and climbed up to the CPR Bridge.

I discovered here that there is no way I am ever going to be able to make it up the Eiffel tower. The stairs are metal mesh that you can see through. I barely made it to the top, and that’s because I finally had the smarts to close my eyes. The view from the top was breathtaking, but I couldn’t get off that bridge fast enough. If a train had come by as I crossed, as one did an hour later when I was safely on the ground, a rescue crew would have been needed to get me moving again!

Once I got across to the U of S campus, the daring bridge crossing was all worth it. I got some fantastic shots of Saskatoon.

It was past lunchtime when I got back to my car, so I decided to head to the ‘trendy’ Broad Street area to scope out a place for a nice lunch, which I found at the Broad Street diner, where they have some amazing fries. Just off Broad Street I found a used bookstore with an owner who is quiiiiiite the character. He talked my ear off about how people today, especially politicians, know nothing about our history. I’d picked up a book on ancient Egypt and he told me I could have it free if I bought the autobiography of Nellie McClung, a suffragette, which he had seen me pick up (and put back down because it was pricey). I hesitated just long enough for him to offer me an even better deal, so I walked out with both books. In my defense, there were so many books on my ‘wish list’ in that store that if I was still living in a real house I could have easily bought a couple dozen!!!

Since I still have that nasty cold (better today, thank you), I was pretty exhausted by this point, so I went home to do laundry and come up with something fun to do in the evening.

The Saskatchewan activities guide mentioned boat tours, but that these tours stop on Labour Day weekend. That said, I’d found the launch for these tours on my walk and a sign there seemed to indicate that there would be a tour at 7PM. A quick phone call confirmed that, so off I went after dinner for a 1 hour cruise up and down the Saskatchewan River. It wasn’t a particularly good cruise in that we had to get any information we wanted from a brochure that was given to us. The brochure was great, but it’s hard to read and look at the scenery at the same time! That said, it was a lovely hour on the water and the weather was mild. Unfortunately, my pictures didn’t turn out.

I have to be off within the next hour. I’m Alberta bound! Tonight’s destination: the Walmart in Lloydminster, a border city of which one part lies in Alberta and the other in Saskatchewan! Tomorrow, I’ll get to Edmonton.

September 20, 2008 by Rae

Regina and the RCMP Heritage Centre

Monday had me at Wascana Lake, in the heart of Regina. It’s surrounded by greenery and has paths along its banks for running, biking, walking, etc. There are a lot of tourist attractions in this area.

Then, the Regina Cemetery. There was a whole section devoted to the graves of children.

There is a native prairie grass garden growing right outside the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. Most of these plants no longer grow naturally as the prairie ecology has been changed to accommodate agriculture.

Now on to Wednesday, which was devoted to touring the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Heritage Centre located right on the site of Depot, where all Mounties get their training. The site has a museum that is well worth the visit and visitors are also allowed to wander the grounds of Depot provided they follow the blue Mountie road.

All the buildings at Depot are in the same style of red brick and sandstone.

Finally, if there’s one nice thing I can say about the RCMP it’s that they sure do know how to put on a show.

I was surprised that I was allowed to take the pictures and videos that I did. Must have something to do with the RCMP’s desperate need to improve their public image and seem more transparent.

September 20, 2008 by Rae

Moose Jaw

Moose Jaw is an easy fifty minute drive from the campground where I stayed, so let’s say about forty minutes from Regina proper. I’m so glad I did the town as a day trip rather than moving on to it with the coach. Those five nights I spent in one location really helped me recoup some energy!

I left for Moose Jaw around quarter to 8, getting into town just before 9, only to learn that the town opens late! Thankfully, I found a coffee shop and was able to kill some time there before 10, when the Tunnels of Moose Jaw ticket office opened.

Moose Jaw’s tunnels are the stuff of legends. Please visit the website to get some more information on their history. They were originally built as a way for steam engineers to easily access the boilers that provided the steam which heated the city, but they soon became the domain of sweatshops and bootlegging. These two topics were the subject of the tours available.

The first tour I went on took me on a Chinese immigrant’s journey upon arrival in Canada at the turn of the 19th century. The Chinese immigrant experience at that time is a true black mark on Canadian history. The tour very effectively conveys the exploitation and degradation these immigrants were subject to. There wasn’t a dry eye in the group when we got back to the surface.

The second tour is about Moose Jaw’s connection with Chicago during the Prohibition era. This tour was very entertaining, but was based on conjecture (that Al Capone might have sought refuge at times in Moose Jaw) and didn’t really provide that much historical information other than to set Moose Jaw as being the place for debauchery at the time. It was nice to finish up with that one, but if you can only take one tour, I recommend the Chinese one.

There’s a small heritage museum at the library, which I toured, then I bought a brochure outlining the steps for a self-guided tour of the town. The temperature in Moose Jaw on Tuesday was torrid. I can only compare it to my experience of Las Vegas in June. A real 30 degrees, not a 30 degrees with humidity. I couldn’t keep myself hydrated, so I knew that I was going to be cutting the day short.

Every single street light in downtown Moose Jaw has a voice that in tones: “The WALK light to cross XXX Street is now on. The WALK light to cross XXX Street is now on. The WALK–” It got to be very annoying, especially in the afternoon when I was trying to take photographs of various buildings and the heat was sapping all my patience. It reminded me of the annoying elevator voice at my job that calls out each floor.

There’s an extension on the back of the building for the police station. This addition perfectly matches the style of the old post office.

Moose Jaw came off as a charming, but faded, town. It had a grimy, sun bleached quality to it. Downtown is just a few blocks square and is very walkable. There’s a lovely park called Crescent Park, right in the middle of town, with a casino and spa on its edges. There are a lot of things to do in the environs, so if I’d had more time and had gone to Moose Jaw with the coach for a few days, as I’d initially planned, I would have had plenty to do.

Why ‘Moose Jaw’? The accepted theory is that the town is named after the Moose Jaw river, which has a bend that looks like the jaw of a moose!

September 20, 2008 by Rae

Lost in an Endless Sea of Blue and Gold

I’m in Saskatoon!

The exclamation point is because I was certain I’d be camping out at the Regina Walmart tonight as there was absolutely no way my mail could have arrived. I mean, it would be way too convenient. But it did!

It turned out to be a good thing that I had to spend that extra day in the Regina area seeing as I woke up with a cold yesterday and felt like doing nothing but lounging around at home. I’m still stuffed up today, but at least I had enough energy to pack up and drive the 300 klicks to Saskatoon and to deal with the issues that needed dealing with this morning.

One of them was having my new wheel retorqued at a Regina Kal Tire (amazing backing up manoeuvres were required there). The other is such a classic Rae moment that those who know me are going to burst out laughing when they read about it. After Kal Tire, I parked at a nearby Walmart to have lunch, scope out the parking lot, and call the post office. I did what I needed to do, got hold of the post office who gave me the good news, and stepped out of the coach to check on the toad, ecstatic that I was going to be on the road to Saskatoon within the half hour.

Which is when I discovered that I’d locked myself out of the RV. All my spare keys were in Miranda. All the windows were shut. My cats can’t open a door. I just stared at the rig for a moment dumbfounded and in complete disbelief of just how absent minded I can be sometimes. Then, I realised that I wasn’t really locked out after all!

When I park somewhere like a Walmart, I crack open a roof vent instead of a window. This afternoon, I just happened to open the one above the kitchen sink. It’s the only one I can fit through! So, I climbed up onto the roof, opened the hatch all the way, and lowered myself down to the counter (discovering at the same time that I’m definitely getting back into shape!).

That was the extent of the excitement for today, thankfully. I do want to say that I am in the market for a device that will activate at the same time as my turn signals and which will scream out: “This coach is moving into the left/right lane! Get the *beep* out of the way!” I cannot believe the number of people today who blatantly ignored my turn signals and purposely sped up to close gaps that I was about to merge into.

Today was a good day on the road. I love waking up not knowing where I’m going to sleep that night.

Please stay tuned for posts about Moose Jaw and the RCMP Heritage Centre!

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A Life By Design

"Sometimes in life, we reach to a right place by departing from a wrong port with a wrong ship!" ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Regina

A Saskatchewan Education, Or Not So Humble Humboldt

Saskatoon

Regina and the RCMP Heritage Centre

Moose Jaw

Lost in an Endless Sea of Blue and Gold