Northern Trails And Tales

Wednesday evening….. For two days now, across Winnipeg and Saskatchewan, we’ve been rolling through the prairies which are quite beautiful in unexpected ways. Montana may be the Big Sky country, but it’s none too small out here. In some places the crops are in, while in others the ground is just being harrowed. Greens and dark browns contrast. In some spots for miles on end there are few trees; in others there are some groves. But the abiding impression is openess and a horizon forever beyond reach. All roads off the highway are gravel, and very dusty. You can see cars trailing a mile of the stuff behind them so I assume car washes do a decent business. Most of the fields are wheat at the Saskatchewan end, but back by Winnipeg, there is a real variety of vegetable crops. Slowly, the prairie has turned from virtual pool table flat to gently rolling land that is still mostly flat. Some of the small towns are really pretty neat including Indian Head where we are staying tonight. This is wheat country unlike Portage la Prairie where they certainly grow wheat but pride themselves on their vegetable crops. Surprisingly, the soil is only a few inches deep here but that few inches must be well protected. It bills itself as the “prettiest town on the prairie” and the proud citizens may well be right. There are some beautiful houses in town, mostly brick, that I would guess date from the 1880’s into the early 1900’s, though the town wasn’t incorporated till 1905. (I’m going to try to get a couple of the pictures we took in town up on the blog…..

Thursday….. We set out to reach Medici ne Hat but decided to push on to Calgary where we now sit in the shadow of the ski jumps at the Olympic Park. For the first time on the trip we had to turn on the windshield wipers, and they remained on most all day. And, in fact, the forecast is for rain or showers through Sunday. This is unfortunate, in a sense, as we are preparing to see what many have billed as the most beautiful scenery of the whole trip. But into every life, as they say…We are planning to spend tomorrow in the city and tour Banff/Jasper National Park on Saturday, but given the quickly changing forecasts may modify our plans. Today, the plains belonged to the stockmen. While wheat is still grown, the main agricultural focus seems to be cattle, and Calgary celebrates this with a month long “stampede” and exhibition with plenty of bronco bustin’ and ropin’ each July. Every smaller town for hundreds of miles around, advertises it’s own annual rodeo. When you reach Alberta, you’ve pretty much come up to the foothills of the Rockies if you continue west. But we’ll be turning north when we resume our trip on Sunday and travel to Edmonton before entering the mountains…..

Friday morning…. This is the first chance I’ve really had to do the blog for more than a few minutes, so let me backtrack for a bit….. For two nights, in Kenora and Prairie la Portage, we ended up camping in the same campground with a couple from Pennsylvania who are also headed to Alaska and who plan to enter through the same small towns of Chicken and Eagle that we do. They used to have a camper but now are tenting all the way. Our routes diverged on Thursday as they headed up the Yellowhead Route turning north a few days before us. Our paths may cross again…. In Regina, a contentious issue is the poor showing of boys on academic tests with parents arguing for more attention to the way boys learn and more boy-focused activities in the schools. A second issue is the incarceration rate of Aboriginals across Saskatchewan. While they account for 10% of the population, they occupy 80% of jail and prison space. None of the proposed solutions to this problem sound too promising….. Trains are miles long and the highway is used by more trucks than cars, or at least it seems that way, though traffic is exceedingly light except around the major
cities….. “Internet availability” means many different things to different campgrounds. Some offer wi-fi,plain and simple. It’s easy to access and you can work from the trailer whenever you want. We’ve only had this once. Some offer paid wi-fi and you need to access a pop-up window to enter a user and password name— and the pop-up keeps disappearing, or is difficult to access— at least given the level of my computer skills. Some offer a public telephone plug-in. AOL works pretty well with this, but Dave’s Earthlink balks. The campground we’re at now you have to put everything on a disk and enter it at a computer at the office. We don’t have any disks with us. McDonald’s up here don’t have wi-fi, at least not that we’ve found. All of this makes daily e-mail and maintaining the blog difficult, but we expect this will change when we reach Alaska, and maybe even as we travel the AlcanHighway. Today or tomorrow, we’ll try the library or maybe the Sheraton, which has a wi-fi you can sneak onto…. In a bit, we’re taking a special campground bus into downtown Calgary (which we drove through last evening at the height of rush hour!) to see the Zoo and Devonian and botanical gardens, if time allows….. Speaking of time, too much is spent in front of a bug smeared windshield. Though we have very few days we’re slated to drive more than five hours, things don’t always work as planned. Yesterday, we spent nearly ten hours from campground to campground, though this was our longest time in the truck by far. The trek allows us to spend a couple days with no driving at all— except the drive through Jasper/Banff , in the park, tomorrow. We’ve traveled about 3,000 miles now, and while the next week will be hectic, driving will become less of a pain soon. But I should be careful not to disparage all the driving as a good part of it has been through interesting areas….

Gas (diesel, actually) mileage through Wednesday night has averaged 11.8 MPG This may reflect a lot of miles on the prairies, but we’re happier than we were after our first calculation…. Newspapers in Canada are a cut above those of the USA. The front pages and sections are devoted to important national, international, and regional news. The fluff, and there’s much less of it, is located elsewhere. As you might expect, the folks up here are very interested in the US news. As they say, “When the elephant moves, you pay attention.” On the other hand, TV up here is worse than in the states, though I have to be careful here because Charmi would tell you all I watch is the Weather Channel. Anyway, a whole lot of time is given over to cartoons and celebrity crap, though they do have news shows at the typical times….We’ve passed through two time zones and are now on Rocky Mountain Time…..