Little 4Runner on the Prairie

The Prairies

Despite everyone's warnings about how boring the prairie states are, we have really enjoyed our week long journey across them. After our brief visit to the US we crossed the border back into Canada, but Ike completely biffed the first question from the border agent. Agent: “Where do you live?” Ike: **silence for 30 seconds** “Uhhhh, Iowa.” Agent: “That was pretty hard for you to answer.” Ike: “Yeah, sorry, it's just that we lived in Madison and just moved all our stuff to our parents' place in Iowa, and ….” Not a good way to start a border crossing interview. :) After answering some questions about jobs and our solar panel (but not about how much alcohol we had), we made it across the border and into Ontario. I don't have a good rebuttall for this. I totally whiffed. Bethany was also kind enough to omit me screwing up where we were going too. I said Sioux Creek, it was actually Sioux Narrows. I do think I made up for it with some of his subsequent questions about bear mace or other things, which made him say “you know your stuff; have a good time in Canada”

We spent the night at Sioux Narrows Provincial Park, happy to be back on the road. We had gorgeous weather and had the pleasure of listening to Cher and other 90's pop stars blaring from our neighbor's campsite.

The next day we booked it across Manitoba, bypassing Winnipeg and heading straight for Riding Mountain National Park. Also passing the longitudinal center of Canda. Officially halfway! We found out it was a holiday weekend in Canada and were a bit nervous about finding a site for the weekend, but we headed out to a remote campground and found plenty of sites available. Another tough decision: the busy cramped campsite for a small chance of wifi, or the remote one? Glad I took the remote one though. A mile or so out from the campground we saw a mama black bear and her three cubs walking along the highway. 

Don't mind me guise, just passing through.

We set up camp, cooked dinner, hid inside our brand new mosquito net, and enjoyed a relaxing evening.... yes, this is what this trip is about! The following day we took advantage of the beautiful weather with a morning bike ride followed by an afternoon dip in the lake. That evening we decided to make a scrumptious stir-fry, when we heard a thunderstorm rolling in. We somewhat frantically finished dinner while putting away as much of our camp gear as possible, then again took refuge inside our mosquito-netted sun shade. Hooray for midwestern storms! (Ike wants to be reincarnated as a storm chaser.)I mean, I just like seeing storms rolling over the prairie! And the discovery channel Storm Chasers show is like, the best thing ever. We enjoyed the rest of our dinner and watched the rain, and the rain, and MORE rain. Pretty soon our campsite was flooding and we abandoned ship and ran to the car for more solid shelter from the storm. We spent the rest of the evening reading in the tent as the storm raged on, which was especially sad because earlier that evening we had met a super-chill family from Manitoba that was camping near us for the weekend.

All right, some clarification: So, the storm that was rolling in was similar to one we saw the day before: low rumbling thunder on the horizon that hinted at a storm, but the first day nothing came of it. The second day, it did. Hiding under the sunshade, we kept huddling closer together as the wind kept whipping the rain under the guard. We bailed on trying to watch a show on the laptop, and when we decided to run to the vehicle, a high-pitched yelp escaped from my lips as I realized the flowing mini-flood had gone underneath the laptop. Thankfully, it was fine.

RE: that super chill family; Bethany and I got into Moon Lake and made our way around to find a campsite; the few really nice sites that faced the lake with a view were naturally taken. We found a nice one that we liked, and I said “should we drop something off before we go sign in so it doesn't get taken?” “No,” Bethany said, “that won't happen.” We signed up and came back to find a van sitting in our spot. I had to kindly ask him to move, which wasn't a huge deal as his son was on the way and they wouldn't have been able to cram both rigs into the double site we had. I may or may not have shot Bethany a glare afterwards.

The next morning we packed up a wet campsite and set out to Saskatoon. We stopped at Inglis along the way to visit the historic row of grain elevators. 

Driving through the prairies we saw very few fields of corn or soybeans (to our surprise), instead we saw wheat and fields with yellow and purple blossoms. At Inglis we found out the yellow flowers were actually canola [actually, rapeseed, but everyone just says canola for obvious reasons], whereas the purple flowers were flax.

During their peak there were more than 5,300 wooden grain elevators across Canada. Today fewer than 300 exist. They have been replaced by larger cement counterparts. We showed up and were the only two there and had an excellent personal tour from a local high school student. Having grown up in a small agricultural town ourselves, we both found the tour and agricultural history really interesting. We especially enjoyed the engineering that went into these behemoths... most parts made entirely of wood and still in working condition today, more than 100 years after their construction.

It was really cool to see engineering from this time: really complicated and technical stuff, but all without the aid of electricity. Everything had to be manually operated, but ways to make it easier were applied to such a degree that a single man could run the elevator.

The couterweight elevator to get easy access to the top of the elevator.  Our guide told us how one of his old trainers hopped on the elevator when he was young and removed the hold, but hadn't adjusted the weights from his boss, who was much larger.  He immediately shot up about 20 ft. before he could 

The worker would use this to change the chute for the grain elevator based on moisture content, weed particles, other things.  He'd use the elevator to get to the top and adjust it manually if this wasn't working.

Manual elevator on the left, the chute arm, and the grain elevator is in the column behind the wheel.  The grain would move up so fast that there were grooves worn in the wood from the grain kernals whipping by.  In the background is the hopper [rectangular box] and different chutes from the various grain bins leading to the hopper.  This elevator had just over 20 grain bins in it. 

We rolled into Saskatoon later that day, camping at a city campground a short distance from downtown. 

Pulling in we were a little leery, seeing so many RVs throughout the park. It turned out we had nice neighbors and a cute little site. [Shoutout to Gwen and Scott!] Turns out we were visiting Saskatoon during a great weekend: both Rib Fest and Fringe Fest were going on! We biked across the river to feast on ribs and brisket (yum) and some local bands. It felt very much like we were back home in 'MURICA. But seriously, the prairies feel more blue collar than Ontario and Quebec. Our second day we toured around Saskatoon on our bikes, hitting up an art gallery, a super cheap and delicious Thai place, and finally the Western Development Museum, which turned out to be super interesting.

The museum theme is “1910 Boomtown” and it shows what a typical early 1900's Saskatchewan town was like, with a long indoor street and recreations of the shops on either side, including a barber shop, livery, dry goods store, post office, newspaper, church, school, railroad station, implement store, etc. And each store had all of the tools, goods, and furnishings of the day. And if that weren't enough, they also had large side rooms with a collection of 1900's-1930's tractors and farm equipment, and another with a car collection. We easily spent 3 hours there and closed the museum, but luckily our tickets got us into the museum for free the next day. So naturally we returned in the morning and spent another 2 hours finishing up the museum. This was the first museum that I have ever been to that I genuinely wanted to see ALL of the exhibits. Score.

In the Barber shop; not sure if I'm more or less likely to go

Prior to electricity service being provided to all of Saskatchewan in the 1950's, many houses had these battery setups. 

In 1964, the Ford Motor company held a contest to find the oldest still used Fordson in Canada; a 1917 model was found in Saskatchewan still in use. 

Called the 'Cock of the North', this monstrosity went through 5k lbs of coal a day.

Nothing says 'innovation' like a tractor body that is primarily made out of wood. 1906 tractor

Popular at fairs in the '20s and '30s, salesmen would hook a tractor up to cables and have it pull itself up to prove how smooth the engine was.

400+ cubic feet of straw gas filled that balloon; the project was abandoned as fuel prices dropped after WWI and the University of Saskatchewan realized that all that gas had less power than a gallon of gas.

After “closing” the museum we biked downtown to the Fringe Festival and saw the hilarious duo of James & Jamesy, a physical comedy gig which was outrageously funny and dynamic. Saskatoon reminded us of Madison with the bike paths, delicious food, and summer festivals... we kind of fell in love, but then we wouldn't want to visit in winter.

The next day was a short 2 hour drive to Lloydminster, Canada's only border town [in the sense that the city is bisected by the border, literally down the middle], with the Saskatchewan-Alberta border bisecting the town. We stayed with Tony, one of Ike's friends from Japan, and his wife An. It was great to meet up with them and hear more about the gas and oil industry that is booming in central/northern Saskatchewan & Alberta. The demand for labor is greatly the housing stock, so many workers rent rooms or even couches for more than our monthly rent back in Madison.

Suwa-Ina reunion trip 4 lyfe!  Can't stop won't stop!

Next up was Elk Island National Park, just outside of Edmonton. The park is a reserve for bison, elk, moose, etc. and, according to our guide book, boasts the second highest concentration of hoofed animals per square kilometer in the world, second only to the Serengeti. We watched a heard of bison grazing in the prairie, took a couple of nice bike rides through the park, and cooled off in the lake near our campsite. 

I think this one is a hippie

"oh hey that ground is looking pretty comfy i should totally have a bath"

"OH BOOM SUCKA M.BISON DROP"

The water was pretty murky because there was an algae bloom, but it wasn't until we got out of the water and were rinsing off that we saw the posted sign: Beware of green-blue algae bloom, which is poisonous to animals and humans. Wait, what? Why wasn't this sign posted down by the water? And why wasn't it BIGGER? And why didn't anyone say anything? Luckily we had only waded into the lake to just above our knees, but we scrubbed our legs with soap and water after we got back to our campsite and are feeling just fine. I hope the wiener dog that was swimming in the water is equally as lucky, sheesh. That night we slept with the rain guard off of our tent, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights (which we still haven't seen), but to no avail.

The next day we packed up our campsite again (we are trying to plow across the prairies to make it up to the Dempster Highway while it's still warm!), and drove into Edmonton. Our first stop was the West Edmonton Mall, the Mall of America's big sister. We stepped out of the car and Ike immediately asked, “Where are the chairs?” “I don't know. I didn't put them in.” Our hearts sank as we realized that somehow we had forgotten to load them onto our trailer before leaving Elk Island. Dang! Guess our 1 hour drive was too good to be true. We hopped back in the car and headed back to the park, luckily the chairs were still there, and then drove the hour back to the mall. Crazy, but the 3 hours in the car still felt like a “brief” drive to us. We've been doing a lot of 6-hour days and are gearing up for a week or more of 8-hour days. Hooray for cheap(er) gas in the prairies! Here in Edmonton gas is a mere $1.10/liter ($4.20/gallon), by far the cheapest we've seen in Canada.

Back in the mall we found our way to one of the food courts and meandered through a fraction of the more than 800 shops (this, in addition to the water park, theme park, hockey rink, etc.). The shopping was overwhelming, but the people watching was pretty great.

This evening we took a short jaunt over to a local craft brew place to meet up with another OT'er [or online aquantance? I dunno, there's not really a way to say it that doesn't sound awkward, but whatevs] and met up with George and his girlfriend Via [apologies on the spelling if I biffed it George] and had a fantastic time. We spent the evening chatting as a wicked storm whipped through.

more fellowship

Tonight we are enjoying the luxury of a hotel in Edmonton before we head out for 10 days or so of remote driving and camping, heading up to Whitehorse and Dawson City in the Yukon, and eventually to Inuvik in the NW Territories, just North of the Arctic Circle. Wish us luck!