Friday, May 21st
The Two Provinces
Through the forest and over the sea
I know there is something waiting there for me.
I know there is some place that I’m longing to be
But it’s through the forest and over the sea.— Captain Tractor, Through the Forest
The rain finally caught up with me late last evening. Over night, it left again. The skies are blue this morning with only a couple of white smears left here or there.
Moose Jaw is even more sad than I thought. Besides the tunnels, there is a big spa and a casino. I wander into the latter to ask if they sell postcards. They don’t. But people are already busy at the slot machines at this early hour. The spa across the road and connected by a covered pedestrian bridge to the casino is huge and nowadays Moose Jaw’s other main attraction. Of the book store, which Google claimed existence of, I can’t find any traces. Whether this is because it has long since closed or because Google (as seems usual at least in Canada) has it at the completely wrong location, I can’t say. Let’s get the hell out of here.
I choose a north-westerly course along, as it turns out, lovely small side roads. So they do have those as well in Saskatchewan and not just big highways and dirt roads. It is a reasonably warm morning, a board by the road claimed fourteen degrees, but for the winds which are even stronger than yesterday. Little birds sit in the grass by the roadside and, when startled by the car and flying up, are blown off north. Good thing the wind isn’t going the other way. They would be blown right into the car. Enough of them actually swoop dangerously across the road at bumper altitude.
The town of Marquis has its cemetery on a hill outside. Looks strangely Viking. The next bigger village is Eyebrow, which claims to have an ice skating rink and a grill. It turns out to be a lovely little prairie town. It looks so happy, that there must dark secrets looming. The next big town after that is Elbow. Really? What’s after that? Pinkietoe?
Something big is coming along the road and we are asked to turn off the rather narrow road at the first opportunity. This turns out to be a rest stop overlooking the Qu’Appelle Valley Dam of Lake Diefenbaker, an artificial lake and largest body of water in Saskatchewan.
I am now far enough west that my Nova Scotia license plates attract attention. I get to talk to a couple who are utterly amazed by my driving across Canada. We talk about travel to strange places and he suggests that the Canadian military may be happy to help you travel to some of the places far north. The trick with Canadians (and this is a bit hard to remember for a German) is to ask nicely.
The big thing turns out to be a truck transporting an entire house that indeed is as wide as the road. Once everyone has left again, I use the quiet to write postcards.
Onwards, the road touches or runs through several tiny villages. The area seems to have been settled at the turn of the last century as most of them have had their centennial a couple of years ago. I follow highway 44 to reach Gardiner Dam, the northern end of Lake Diefenbaker, which turns out to have unpaved stretches. The Dam is huge, actually consisting of two dams, one of which contains a hydroelectric power station. Around the damn is Danielson Provincial Park with some beaches and boat launches.
After Macrorie, highway 44 turns completely unpaved, quite in disagreement with my map. So I turn north and rather follow highway 15. This takes me dangerously close to Outlook but I can avoid it by a couple of hundred metres.
The most visible feature of Milden is a large Petrocanda storage facility with five big tanks. Rosetown, the next bigger place, claims to have ‘all services’ including a camp ground. Like all towns here, it has a Co-op, which accounts for most of the services, it is a petrol station, grocery store, and community communications centre (aka gossip central). There also is an A&W, which probably counts as a restaurant.
Further on: ‘Tumbleweed!’
The road now zig-zags to avoid a mountain range running south-east to north-west. Or, well, ‘mountain range’ in finger quotes. I pass the town of Herschel, which apparently is known for a plesiosaurus found here (but I only find that out through Wikipedia just now. There were no signs). The ‘mountains’ end at the lovely little village of Stranraer down in the Eagle Creek valley. It features Mountain View Park. The park, probably created by locals in their own time, features wood silhouettes of all sorts of animals strewn all over the valley walls. There are cats and dogs, pelicans and other walking birds, moose, bison, horses, everything really. A sign points down a road towards Two Towers Ski Area.
Plenty, which isn’t, but it has a big school where lots of school buses are making ready for their afternoon round. On the fields, the first oil wells appear. Dodsland has the Dodsland Druid Cemetery on top of a hill outside of town. Further on, where highways 31 and 21 merge, the landscape is riddled with oil wells. But they are all turned off, except for the very last one a bit off, which may not yet have gotten the order yet. Is the oil prize too low currently?
At Kerrobert I have to fuel up the car. The petrol station is run by a Chinese man who harasses his new trainee attendant. Why is it that Chinese people always come across as angry? Kerrobert is a dusty prairie town. It sits in the middle of open fields and has no protection from the winds whatsoever. Everything looks as if it has been sandblasted.
Onwards, the town of Luseland is a most active little community. It starts off with a Memorial Trout Pond, has an airport and both a hotel and a motel. It also has the most complete Wikipedia page off all Saskatchewan towns, plus a website of its own, announcing the town’s centennial for 2010. And all this with a population of 540. Which I take as proof to my theory presented earlier.
The sky has been slumbering all they, but now the Sky Theatre starts its big afternoon show again. Clouds are brewing in the north. Some of them are reaching down and form what looks like twisters. But I pass by the big weather, yet again driving along its border. All I get is a couple of lost raindrops.
I am passing more prairie towns: Salvador, Denzil, Private. Each has a pair of grain elevators, one old, one new, by the train station, which is mainly used to park unused train cars in an endless line.
Macklin, a small town near the border with Alberta, starts off with St. Josephs Health Facility, yet another well maintained hospital. It also has the Rainbow Motor Inn and a truck weighing station. But the town is best know, at least to a select few people, as the venue of the annual World Bunnock Championships. Bunnock is game invented by bored Russian soldiers involving horse anklebones (which can be found aplenty on the Russian wastelands) and described as a cross between curling and bowling. The town features the world’s largest Bunnock, a ten metre tall statue of an anklebone. It also has a board explaining the game but it seemed to involved to me.
After Macklin, the road turns north. The landscape becomes hilly again. As it is mostly grassland, it looks like an oversized golf course. Here and there are small salt lakes. For the first time I can spot magpies. There are also some oil wells again. About twenty kilometres on, the road turns north-west and crosses into Alberta. Wild rose country, or so do the license plates and the welcome sign say. Whatever that means.
A couple of cows are resting by the shores of a salt lake. They look rather evil, which may or may not be the result of liking too much salt. But just keep this in mind when you add extra salt to your next meal. A donkey is grazing on a meadow. It doesn’t look evil at all. But there are no salt lakes nearby.
The landscape changes and becomes rather billowy. It is interrupted by various small gorges formed by the streams.
The road turns a bit further east and now runs exactly along the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. As I am driving on the east side of the road, I am probably in Saskatchewan. But I shall treat it as Alberta for accounting purposes. No idea who is responsible for maintaining the road.
Eventually it arrives in Lloydminster, which is special mostly for the fact that it lies in both Alberta and Saskatchewan, highway 17 forming its Main Street, but is not a pair of twin cities. Which must make running the place a bureaucratic nightmare. As the town also lies on the northern branch of the Trans-Canada, it is a bustling commercial centre. It seems to consist exclusively of commercial strips, although admittedly, I don’t go as far as the city centre but instead turn left towards the motels.
I pick an independent inn that features both a restaurant and an Irish pub. Given that it is Friday, I decide to treat myself to proper dinner. The restaurant is mentioned in the guide book as a favourite among locals. Which looked true enough, but doesn’t really place Lloydminsterians into a favourable light. The restaurant actually is a chain outlet and, frankly, A&W makes more exciting burgers. The Irish bar is a huge disappointment as well. I don’t really expect them to have anything interesting on tap and I am right. What’s worse—and I may be getting used too much to Canada—service is bad. Two girls are standing behind a bar, lazily leaning on a desk and chatting. One ask me what I want and then … does nothing and just continues chatting with her friend. Er, hello? Eventually, it turns out she isn’t the bartender who returns a bit later and finally I get my beer.
Beer of the day: Kokanee (a rather bland lager from B.C., named after a mountain range not a drug.)