Winnipeg » Saskatoon

We're in Saskatoon now, and have been for a couple of days. Alison's grandfather's 100th birthday celebration is this afternoon, in the seniors' complex in which we're staying. There is actually wireless internet here! It's sporadic, but it exists.

I have notes on the drive here from Winnipeg, which I was going to work up into a proper post, but there never seems to be an extended period of time for that. So I think I'll just give you the point-form version essentially verbatim, along with some photos and video:

• Rained the night before, so no Red River photos possible. But here's a shot out the motel window.


• Starbucks for coffee before leaving. Served by a younger version of Jack Black.

• Black line of clouds early on extends eerily downward and immediately becomes HEAVY rain, and then large hail (size of rock salt). Have to stop briefly. Skyscrapers of Winnipeg still visible on horizon. Clouds are so close here you can watch them move relative to each other.



• A few hawks seen.

• Stop at the "Chicken Corral" in Neepawa for fried egg & cheese sandwich lunch. Waitresses sing in Rankinesque 3-part harmony for monetary pledges in support of "Lily Infestation" festival.

• Which reminds me, and this is not in my notes, the restaurant we had lunch in the day before was called "P. I.'s Lounge" and was a total dive that smelled like vinegar, with weird pictures of babies on the walls and Christmas lights everywhere, and the food was really great. There was a pickup truck parked outside with the Ontario license plate "CHEZBRGR".

• Alison sees a coyote sitting by the side of the road.

• Ali and I figure out that the game of Cows is impossible to play on the prairies because when you see them they are in groups of ≥ 100, i.e. no fun to count. So we play Horses instead.

• Sky and land get bigger and bigger; another short shower.



• Eat left-over garlic broccoli & ginger fish fillet at Saskatchewan border.

• The 1-road town of Langenberg (Co-op store, Golden Bowl Chinese restaurant, Save Room for Dessert Bake (sic) & Eatery) has red-, yellow-, & green-striped banners lining its one half-km road, probably not indicating a strong Jamaican presence.

• 13–10 for me so far at 2:55, or 1:55, depending on whether Saskatchewan's shunning of DST means we have to set the clock back another hour, a question about which there's been some debate. Game goes to 50, and there haven't been any graveyards yet.

• Canada geese with babies by a pond in Yorkton.

• Today there are roads leading off in other directions, plus great visibility of sights in those directions besides dense, unpopulated forest, relieving us of the in retrospect fairly apt impression that we have been stuck going one way along a 1-dimensional track where if you stop moving for some reason good luck ever getting found by someone, not unlike a fat kid caught Augustus-Gloop fashion in a completely enclosed waterslide like the indefinitely out of order one at our motel two nights ago in S.S. Marie, our unanimous fascination with which only now strikes me as symbolically fitting.



• Ali moves into the lead — 16–13 — just past Yorkton.

• Stop at a tiny picnic park in Foam Lake. Throw a softball with Alison. A small bird sings insistently, defying us to find it in a dense tree. No one ever gets a clear look at it, even with the binoculars. Probably a red-eyed vireo, though.

• Graveyard! 16–0. 13 really is an unlucky number.

• A pizza place in Lanigan across from the gas station where I pull out the end of the infinite towel in the washroom claims to be "Home of the Big Slice," but I know it is lying because that's in Halifax.


• Realize in Plunkett looking out to the point where field meets sky that the oft-alleged similarity between prairie living and coastal living, viz. the proximity of large open spaces, does not exactly hold, because looking out at the ocean from the shore is always looking at an implied infinity that is other than oneself, whereas the prairies' endless distance surrounds you — you are in the centre of it. There is an extra, breath-stopping sense of utter freedom on top of that awe associated with the grandeur and ultimate imponderability of nature.



• < 1 hr. outside of Saskatoon: 10–0 for me after a few more graveyards on either side. How will someone ever get to 50?

• Of course they don't. We get into Saskatoon, check into the seniors' complex, meet Alison's grandpa, and eat dinner at Smitty's. Turns out I'm right about the DST thing and so we've gained another hour. Seinfeld and early to bed. It'll be weird not to be on the road again tomorrow. I kind of wish we could keep on going all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But I also feel dizzy from watching the land fly by all day, and am actually having a bit of a hard time walking.

And now I'm behind again, as there's already a couple of days in Saskatoon to add to this, but it'll have to wait. The birthday's about to get underway.