Day 104 – July 16

We were back on our regular schedule and awake at 7:00. We wanted to head into Saskatoon and visit the ‘Taste of Saskatchewan’ event which promised a variety of ethnic food booths set up in a park downtown. After searching for the event venue we circled the block a couple of times to find a good parking spot for the beast which, as luck would have it, turned out to be right across from the event site. However, as fate would have it, we had to walk 10 minutes to find a bank to get change to feed the voracious parking meter. We took advantage of our financial side bar to drop into the CAA office and pick up some maps of the prairies, the detail of our Milepost guide has spoiled us for the minutiae not found in some of our larger scale maps.

Once the logistics of parking were worked out we explored the site. There were a couple of dozen booths set up offering things as mundane as pop and water to the more esoteric African Stew (no giraffe in the stew – I asked). Purchases were made by way of tokens, bought for $2.50 at booths throughout the site. It is a clever arrangement, no need for everyone to keep cash, it speeds up transactions but also tokens are clever, like using VISA, you loose track of what the real cost of things are.We sampled African, Mexican, Brazilian and Chinese with a finish of Canadian ice cream – a very multicultural lunch.

We also wanted to visit the Affinity Gallery in the Saskatchewan Craft Council which is dedicated to the celebration fine craft. There was an installation themed ‘à table’ which highlighted metal work around the theme of food – its eating and preparation. You can see the works at http://www.saskcraftcouncil.org/gallery/2013/a-table.php.

Interestingly there was a piece called ‘Dragonfly Bowl’ by Elizabeth Goluch, a Nova Scotian artist. Diane has a piece of her Lizzie Bugs jewellery. The gallery staff were very friendly and we ended up giving them a tour of the BRT. After a quick strategy meeting in the BRT curb side we decided to head towards Regina, not quite a spin of the roulette wheel but without any particular destination in mind, so long as we are heading east, anything goes.

Dragonfly Bowl

Our walk uptown from the spacious downtown park and our drive across the river to the gallery reinforced what we had been told by Chris and Kirk following their visit here for the Jazz Festival. Saskatoon is a pleasant and interesting city. It really deserved more time to explore but we are both becoming mindful of our schedule and we want to be back home before August, we wouldn’t want our trip to cut into our summer vacation time back home. Have I mentioned home much we are enjoying being retired?

As we moved away from Saskatoon the land really began to flatten with only the odd patch of trees interrupting an otherwise seamless horizon. Canola and alfalfa still appear to be the primary crops dressing the roadside in contrasting fields of blue green and neon yellow. As we approached Regina some quick research showed that the campgrounds were on the eastern side of Regina, luckily accessible via the ring road that circles the southern part of the city. We pulled into the Kings Acres Campgrounds which was very similar to the Saskatoon 16 West RV Park where we had stayed the previous night.

It was another empty the fridge night so supper was easy and we had a relaxing evening broken up only by the entertainment of a couple who pulled into the site next to us to set up a tent. They were about our age but something about the awkwardness of their conversation gave us the impression that they were a recent couple and based on the newness of the gear camping appeared to be a new experience for them. The tent was just out of the box and they appeared overwhelmed by the plethora of bungie corded poles and amorphous pile of nylon that rolled out on the ground. At one point the man of the couple resorted to reading the instruction manual, a humiliating action for any man, topped only by stopping and asking for directions, even when clearly lost.

However eventually the pile of nylon and poles slowly began to take on the general appearance of a tent and when they finally realized that the last set of poles left on the ground were not in fact spare parts they had a shelter for the night that resembled a tent much more than the collapsed parachute it could have been taken for a hour before. No set up records broken but as a new couple they had built a memory as well as a tent and they sat for a while and admired their work.

We reviewed our pile of accumulated tourist brochures trying to find highlights for our anticipated visit to Regina the following day. We left the task uncompleted as we went to bed.

Day 105 – July 17

We spent some additional time at breakfast reviewing the travel brochures and on line info about Regina. Although feeling somewhat guilty, neither of us saw much to warrant engaging in the early morning traffic we saw passing Regina bound on the Trans Canada. Possibly we sold Regina short. In my former municipal bureaucratic life I had been constantly reminded by one of HRH’s female Councillors of the virtues of Regina, how in comparison to us they had it right. To my closest of friends I referred to these tirades as her ‘Regina Monologues’ and I was curious to see what, if anything, substantiated the claims. However I no longer felt the obligation to take a busman’s holiday and we headed east towards Manitoba.

As we approached the eastern boundary of Saskatchewan we had our first sighting of windmills. By comparison to what we had seen in California and other states it was a very small farm with most of the mills either stopped or just perceptibly moving. Considering the expansive uninhabited landscape I was surprised by the lack of effort to take advantage of the wind. Maybe when you are up to your eyeballs in one of the greatest, all be it diminishing, reserves of petroleum in the world you really don’t spend much time thinking about alternate energy. Or possibly the cattle, sometimes the only visible living thing within miles of the highway, have developed a lobby complaining that windmill noise make their steaks tough.

Around noon we stopped at Moosomin, one of those little nubs of human habitation that seem to spring up anywhere two roads cross in the prairies, for a coffee break and some planning strategy for our approach to the ‘Peg’, yet some 4 hours off according to my GPS .

We crossed into Manitoba around 1:00. We have one ‘prairie’ province left and so far we have not encountered the ‘deadly boring roads of endless wheat fields punctuated only by iconic grain silos’ that we have been warned of by others. Possibly our more southerly route has by passed these iconic scenes.

We arrived on the westerly outskirts of Winnipeg around 5:00 and pulled into the Winnipeg West KOA campsite, a somewhat less well appointed KOA than we have seen in other cities but quite acceptable right along the banks of the very muddy Assiniboin River. We had identified a number of sights in Winnipeg so our plan for the next day was to spend some time there before heading on.

Supper was a delicious fish chowder, made using one of the two remaining fillets of lake trout from Lake Labarge.