Author: Rae

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Paving Day

For some reason, people like to complain about how bad the roads are in Saskatchewan. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I drove in Quebec for as many years as I did and know what truly bad roads are like. Sure, we get potholes in the spring, but they get filled very quickly. Pavement also gets patched and gravel roads are frequently graded. Considering the small population here and low taxes, I’d understand having crappy roads, but road maintenance appears to be a priority, another reason to love SK. I still haven’t figured out how Quebecers can pay such taxes and have such bad roads, but that’s another discussion.

The weekend around June 24th is always a huge one for my hamlet. Bikers from all over come to our little park for what’s called the Boogie to camp, listen to music, and talk bikes. For days before the event, motorcycles roar through the area en route to our sleepy, so unimportant, and forgettable hamlet. One of the hamlet access roads is paved and it is always in rough shape by this time of year. Once the freeze/thaw cycle is over, the potholes are marked with signs and fluorescent paint and we locals know where they are and can slalom around them. But a week before the Boogie, everything changes. Our gravel road to Willow Bunch gets an extra grading and the paving crews come out in force to repave our other access road.

And I just happened to decide to do a town run on Paving Day. It was slow trip to town, but I’m not complaining! All the potholes were filled with gravel and the crews were starting on the paving. Big shoutout to them for all their hard work!

My town run was prompted by the fact that I was completely out of food. I’m doing a good job of not stocking up on anything… Before going to the grocery store, I stopped in at SGI (our DMV) to find out if I can lower my monthly registration and insurance fee for the truck since it won’t be driven for about a year. Absolutely. The vehicle won’t be registered (street legal) and I will be covered for liability only in case someone  steals the truck, goes on a joy ride, and destroys property or, worse, injures or kills someone. The cost will be $50 for a year, saving me an $80 monthly payment! Wow!

Next stop was the art gallery to pick up a ticket for a Great Plains concert on Saturday night! Saskia and Darrel are friends of C&C and put on a great show. I’ve seen them play a few times and they never disappoint. I’ll be going in with C&C and we might do dinner first.

I then had lunch, did a couple more errands, and finally got my groceries. I don’t want to get into the price of crappy tomatoes, but boy is pork consistently a great deal!

My thieving neighbour was in the store and we did a great job of pretending we didn’t see each other…

I took a secondary grave road home to avoid the paving crews. Even a gravel road in SK is better than a paved road in most other parts of Canada, especially in a zippy little pickup truck!

Now, I’m going to finish my work today and then start experimenting with my packing. My last order of clothing arrived today, so I’m ready to see how much everything I want to bring weighs and then start subtracting pieces. I’m starting to regret deciding to go with a suitcase since it alone uses up a full quarter of my weight allowance. I suspect that I may do a frantic run to Montana next week to pick up a super lightweight backpack rush ordered from Amazon… But we’ll see what the scale says tonight! 🙂

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Off to London!

Well, Passport Canada came through… I was so happy to see the “you have something at the counter” notice this morning because I knew all the packages I’m still expecting aren’t due till the end of the week so it had to be my passport! I got in and promptly went to skyscanner.ca to book my flight. I’ve been checking prices daily and the fluctuation is incredible. I really thought I would leave mid-week as that’s when the best prices always show up. Indeed, I saw a $400 ticket leaving next Tuesday on a route I was happy with, but I was hyperventilating at the thought of leaving that quickly.

I did one final scan of the month and an unbelievable deal through Travelocity popped up for next Friday, the 24th. Not only was the price great, but the route was perfect. It left Regina at 12:30, about the earliest I’d want to fly out since I have a 2.5 hour drive to the airport and I have to be there three hours early. It did have two stops, but one of them would let me finally add Newfoundland to my visited provinces list ( 🙂 ) and it was by far the quickest trip I’d seen between Regina and London clocking in at just under 13 hours. It would also take me to Gatwick rather than Heathrow.

But there was just one ticket left at that price… I lost out on a couple of Travelocity deals to Mérida while I was thinking things over, so I didn’t hesitate to grab my credit card. And I got the seat! I’m not happy I’ll be flying all the way to London on WestJet (ie. in a sardine can), but for $333, I would have been nuts not to jump on this deal! $333 for Regina to London! I can’t even get to Montreal for that price!

The way the flight is broken up will be nice. I’m flying to Toronto first, a three-hour trip. I’ll then I have the bare minimum of time needed to make my connection to St. John’s, 40 minutes. That will also be a three-hour trip. I’ll have a 1.5 hour layover, which is the perfect layover length, and then it’ll just be five hours to London. No sitting in the same seat for eight plus hours. Of course, I don’t expect to get any sleep so it’ll be interesting to see how I am Saturday when I land in London. 🙂

When I went to Scotland in ’98, I had a similar itinerary and hadn’t slept in almost 30 hours by the time I got to Glasgow. I pushed through my day, went to bed around 7:00 PM and woke up pretty much on local time the next morning. I’m hoping the same thing will happen this year. Yes, I might be nearly 20 years older, but I’m also much healthier. So I’m optimistic I won’t be a zombie for my whole time in London. 🙂

I’ve secured a private room in a house through Airbnb for four nights (three full days not counting the Saturday). It should be convenient to everything I want to see, not too difficult to get to from Gatwick, and at $56 per night, it’s right in my budget. So with the flight to London and accommodation being so inexpensive, I should be able to handle the outrageous food prices.

Now, to figure out the Oyster card system…

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SaskTel Had a Province-Wide Internet Outage — And It Was a Good Thing!

Friday afternoon, Saskatchewan was cut off from the rest of the world when the internet, including mobile data, went dead across the province. Since they have the monopoly in this province, they own all the equipment. There were no obviously no redundancies on their grid so the only people who would have had internet service had to have been on Xplornet. This was SaskTel’s second province-wide outage in two months. Both were caused by faulty equipment.

I went through a serious telecom outage this when I was up in Yukon. There was just one cable bringing service into the territory and it got waterlogged from all the firefighting going on. All telecom went down. When an outage like that happens in a remote territory with a population of around 25,000, it’s just one of those things that happen when you live up north. But in a province of more than one million people? It’s embarrassing.

The part of the outage that proved to me that SaskTel is not up to the task of running a 21st century telecom grid is how long it took for their answering service to get a message up saying, “We’re aware there’s a problem. It’s province-wide. We’ll update again as soon as we know how long t his will take.” You know, what SaskPower does within minutes of the lights going out. Instead, SaskTel’s answering service got flooded and would just hang up on you.

What I found most interesting about the outage was that I could have predicted it if I had thought about it hard enough. My internet was actually fine after I got the new booster last year. I was getting a decent signal and no drops. I could live with it. But my connection has been a nightmare since I got back this spring and it hasn’t been any better in town. I couldn’t get anything worth mentioning done in Moose Jaw and I had a hard time getting my emails in Willow Bunch. Something was up with the network, but SaskTel brushed me off at every call, telling me the problem was my phone.

It’s now the second morning since the outage. I have had a strong, steady signal (comparable to what I get without the booster areas where I don’t need the booster) since the internet came back up Friday morning. Yesterday was a perfectly non-frustrating day when I had research to do and while Google is still very slow, my searches came up. I even had internet well past 8PM when I normally don’t have usable service in the evening. Everything’s been fine this morning.

At some point while I was away, SaskTel increased speeds at the tower I connect to. When I’m not throttled and my signal is strong (as it’s been since yesterday morning), I’m getting speeds that are 2.5 times faster than last year (2.5Mbps). Considering what I went through for internet service until I got the new booster, I could actually be satisfied with this service if I knew I could rely on having it every day. I’m not delusional. I know that adequate internet service will take ages to come out here and I would be happy with small steps like doubling our speeds every six to twelve months. It says a lot that I didn’t notice for almost a month that I was getting better speeds than last year!

What the outage made me realise is that Haven’s internet issue is a Saskatchewan-wide issue. They’re always going to have the infrastructure, but we need more ISPs competing for business on that infrastructure so that there is more accountability when that infrastructure fails. Bell and Rogers are not a true competitors. What we need are small locally-owned ISPs that understand the unique challenges of operating a telecom in Saskatchewan. There are a couple, but they operate out of Saskatoon and Regina. I’ve contacted them to show that there is a large untapped market between the TransCanada and the Montana border, including the communities of Assiniboia, Willow Bunch, Coronach, Rockglen, and Scout Lake, that has been neglected by SaskTel and needs more options. Once these smaller ISPs get a foothold down here, then we can start having the conversation about getting service to the Sylvan Valley.

I’ve been in contact with ISPs in other provinces that offer nearly Canada-wide service, but are not in Saskatchewan. They all cite the difficulty of doing business with SaskTel as the primary reason why they are not in the province yet. And they were all very interested to learn that there is such an untapped market desperate for them to hammer out some sort of agreement with SaskTel.

Stressful as the outage was, it ended up being a good thing as it fixed something majorly wrong with SaskTel’s service. I just hope that I continue to enjoy adequate service for my last couple of weeks here.

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One Major Itinerary Decision Made

For months now, I’ve been trying to find the cheapest way to get myself to Europe. I knew there had to be a city that would be insanely inexpensive to get to even from Regina and from which I could get to my next destination for very little. I thought that Frankfurt might be that city and, indeed, there are great deals there, but it’s not the best deal.

As it turns out, the best deal is… London! Actually, both London and Glasgow are very close in price, but if you’re going on to Central and Eastern Europe, then you might as well go directly into London since you’d have to go through there from Glasgow anyway. I am finally ready to book a flight as soon as my passport gets here. I should be spending the last week of June (this month!) or the first week of July in London!

I have three options to get to London:

  1. I can pay out of pocket for the whole trip and do the Regina-Calgary-London route in 13 hours door-to-door. Rates for that are between $400 and $450, but I’m seeing deals as low as $325 on less desirable routes.
  2. I can use my travel reward points and pay only about $100 in taxes and fees, to do Regina to several different Canadian destinations to London, with super long layovers in 30 to 45 hours… If I had a job that I could literally do anywhere, that option would probably be a no brainer, but since I don’t I think I will save my points for the trip home and just pay out of pocket this time around since I’m not on a super tight budget.
  3. I’m going to keep monitoring deals from Toronto since I can get to Toronto for free with my points. If I find something under $300 from Toronto, it would be worth doing the trip this way.

From London, I am sitting on three different possibilities. From least to most likely:

  1. I am waiting to hear back about a housesitting assignment in London for July. I know that I would very likely never get another opportunity to spend a month so very near central London for very little cost, hence why I am considering such a twist in my travel plans. But I find this to be a very unlikely outcome and it’s not one I’m counting on.
  2. I am also waiting to hear back about another housesitting assignment in a mountain resort town outside of Prague, Czech Republic. I would really love for this to work out, but the family is having trouble confirming their travel plans even though we have been talking about this for over four months! I won’t know for another two weeks and so I’m not going to make any plans beyond London at this time. London to Prague, or just about anywhere else in Europe, is so inexpensive that I’ll be fine to book at the last minute.
  3. Just do a few days in London and then fly to Bulgaria or to some other destinations and take my time getting to Bulgaria.

London is one of the most expensive cities in the world and was never on my radar of places for me to visit. When I was in Scotland 18 years ago, a lot of folks told me I should take the train to London for a few days and even then I did not see the point when there was so much to see and do in Scotland. I never regretted my decision. So other than the British Museum, I had absolutely no idea until a couple of weeks ago what I would want to see or do in London, but I did know that I would regret not spending at least a few days there. Now, I have a bit of an itinerary sorted out and I’m beyond ready to get there! 🙂

So if option one doesn’t pan out, which would give me a lot of time to explore the city, I found surprisingly decent Airbnb rates for private rooms. So as long as the accommodation doesn’t all disappear before my passport gets here, I can treat myself to a holiday in London for four or five nights. It will give me time to get over the worst of the jet lag and to see a bit of that huge city. However, I may not have that much time if the Czech gig works out since at the rate my passport is taking, I won’t get to London till the very end of June and I would be needed near Prague on July 1st.

But if option one does out, I would be in London till August 12th, and then in Bulgaria through the rest of August, September, and as far into October as I can stand the weather. I will then need to find somewhere warmish and out of the Schengen Area to hole up until the end of December, when I would head to Portugal and/or southern Spain for three months.

If option two works out, I would be in the Czech Republic to the start of August. I wouldn’t have had time to visit Prague at the beginning of my stay, so I would spend some time there, then go to Poland for a week and then start working my way down to Bulgaria. I have a detailed itinerary for that planned where I’d be able to see Budapest, Bucharest, Belgrade, Athens, and a host of other cities and countries before arriving in Bulgaria at the start of September. I would then be there as long as I can stand the weather, up through the end of November, and then my itinerary would line up with the first option.

If neither of the first two options works out, I’m probably going straight to Bulgaria.

But, really, I’m not ready at this time to commit to anything beyond getting to London other than being certain that I will end up in Bulgaria at some point (I have not learned to say, “Beer, please,” and “thank you” for nothing!) and that I want to spend the dead of winter (January through March) in Portugal. The Schengen Area rules are making things complicated and I have to make up my mind about Turkey.

Things are going to move very quickly in the next couple of weeks! Soon as the passport’s here, I’ll book a flight and at least a couple of nights’ accommodation in London. Once I know what date I’m leaving, I can plan to terminate my vehicle insurance, my power, and my cell service, all of which will reduce my budget significantly and help me pay for things like my worldwide health insurance and a special commercial policy for my electronics.

I’ve got my packing list pretty much locked down and am awaiting just a few more online orders to be able to start packing trials. You can look forward to a detailed packing list post when I get to that point, something I’m sure the ladies will enjoy more than the men. 😉

And, of course, I want to keep working as much as I possibly can before I go! I’m starting to refill the coffers a little and I have as big a client load as I can juggle right now, so I am leaving with no concerns on the work end of things.

I just have to remind myself that I’m not heading on a year-long vacation and that my focus should be on staying long-term in a couple of locations (my preferred mode of travel anyway) than trying to hit as many countries as I can since, surely, this won’t be my last time across the pond…

So London! Last time I was in the UK, a pint in Scotland averaged about £1.25. I have a feeling I’m going to get severe sticker shock the first time I walk into a pub in a few weeks! 😀

 

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Why I Am Fighting for My Haven

I started this blog to record all aspects of my life, including my ferocious love for this little slice of Canada that seems so distant, in the best of ways, from the rest of the country. To the many of you who have told me to stop whining about the internet situation here and move, I feel so sorry for you. I feel sorry that you have never lived somewhere that you love as much as I love my Haven and I feel sorry that you have been brainwashed by this country’s government to believe that status quo is best and that nothing can or should change. I need to record this fight against the ultimate Goliath as I use links to posts in my missives to various companies, politicians, lawyers, and media outlets. I invite you to use your back button if you don’t want to read these posts.

For those of you who want to keep reading, this is my fourth summer at Haven, so it’s time to do a recap of why there is nowhere else in Canada for me to be.

In no particular order here are the things I love about my Haven.

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My cosy little homestead. I might have started off camping at Haven, but now it’s a proper home.

It’s right on the US border. There is nowhere else left along the Canada/US border but southern Saskatchewan where properties are still affordable. I lived near the US border nearly my whole life and that was important to me when began to look for a place to buy. I save a ton on shipping fees by having things sent to my parcel service in Montana and the proximity to inexpensive US fuel is a perk when heading south.

Haven is also right smack in the middle of the continent. All roads converge here, really. I’m never more than half a continent away from anything. I can get to BC and to Montreal in about the same amount of time. When I go Mexico, I don’t have to travel very far in Canada and I save a ton on fuel. Roads to Haven are really good and I’m close enough to the more traveled highways, like the TransCanada, that it’s not a huge detour for friends traveling between the eastern and western parts of the country to visit.

Most of the people in my community are likeminded non-conformists. They are self-sufficient people with a lot of common sense who don’t think I’m peculiar for living in my RV or wanting to travel. Conformists would ask me why I do these things. Non-conformists just ask how they can make my unusual lifestyle easier. We’re having trouble with our RM (rural municipality) management trying to bring in stupid rules like building permits (when we don’t even have building codes) or that we can’t have RVs on our lots or that we have to mow our lawns to certain standards. My neighbours’ and my response to that was laughter and resistance. If we wanted that kind of nonsense, we would have bought “in town.”

These are salt of the Earth people who measure their wealth as I do, by the joy they get out of their lives, not by the things they buy. There is no “keeping up with the Joneses” here. Nowhere else in all my travels have I landed somewhere with such a motley group of folks, not all of whom I like or like me, who so fiercely make me believe that I have found my people. I can be myself here without censorship and when people make fun of me, there is such affection in their tone that I cannot do anything but feel protected and nurtured, something I haven’t felt very often in my life.

Internet notwithstanding, Haven is a really great place to stop and work. There are so few distractions here. It is super quiet and town is just far enough away to not be an option most days, but close enough if I need a change of scenery. This is by far my favourite place I’ve parked the RV and worked. I have an amazing view of both the sunset and the sunrise. I enjoy watching birds and bunnies and gophers all day. Other than the odd lawn mowing during the day, I can count on quiet to do my transcription work. I wake up to the song of the mourning dove, fall asleep to the soothing howl of the coyote, and in between, the mooing of cows is a joyful melody.

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I was amused this morning by this bird sitting right on top of my internet antenna pole.

Haven has a post office. As long as I can get folks to ship through Canada Post or USPS to a PO box, I can get almost anything delivered here and I can ship things out.

The two nearby communities, Willow Bunch and Assiniboia, provide the essentials. Willow Bunch is less than 15 minutes away and has a bigger post office, a small food store, a great thrift shop, a good pub, and an awesome museum, to which I have a lifetime membership. Assiniboia is 35 minutes away and has a bigger food store, a CIBC (my main bank), an art gallery, a liquor store, and many other services, including a small cinema. Movies are a little slow to come here, but main ones do and a viewing is inexpensive. I don’t go to our cinema often, but I also never feel a need to figure out how to schedule myself around showings in Moose Jaw.

Which brings me to the fact that bigger stores, while 150KM away, are easily accessible from Haven. It’s a boring (but scenic) drive to Moose Jaw, but an easy one. There’s no such thing as traffic out here. I hate driving in cities like Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and their suburbs. Here, driving is a pleasure over long flat stretches of mostly good roads.

Haven is in a proper community with streetlights and all services but internet and cable television. I could have had a lot of the things I like about Haven itself, maybe even the price of the property, on an acreage in another province, but there are advantages to living in a proper community. I have neighbours to watch over my place when I’m gone, I have fire service, and it’s not insanely expensive to get hooked up to utilities since everything is to my property line. This is the only proper community that I found that would let me use my lot as an RV pad with no promise of building a house within a certain amount of time, and then add in the piddly amount I paid for my lot.

Keeping Haven even if I’m not here a lot isn’t a huge financial burden. The property is paid for and I have $450 a year in property taxes as well as a token amount for water and garbage pickup. Even if I had been able to find another community that would let me have an RV as a residence, I would have had to take out a mortgage to buy it and pay much higher property taxes and service fees.

The climate here is the best in Canada by my standards, mostly dry and sunny, with very little humidity and bugs. A winter here at 50 below with sun beat a winter in BC at 5 above with intense humidity and no sun for six months. Our little valley is in a microclimate of its own and our weather is always better than Assiniboia, Moose Jaw, and Regina. While we do get horrible wind and hail storms, our valley protects us from tornados.

This part of Saskatchewan is incredibly scenic. I know that rolling olive green hills and bright blue skies are not to everyone’s taste, but they are to mine. I walk daily to the post office and I alway pause both ways to fill my soul with the beauty of our hills. I cannot take the views here for granted because I never had such a profound sense of “coming home” as I did the first time I arrived on the Prairies.

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This is the view from my picture window at the rear of my office. The sky is ever changing. The grass won’t be that lush and green for long!

This is what I wrote about this area my first time through here, nearly eight years ago, when I hadn’t even yet seen the BC coast, Vancouver Island, or Yukon. I already knew where I was going to land one day and I got shivers rereading this:

Being out here on the prairie fills me with such peace. There is something about the plains that has always made sense to me. When I first encountered them in North Dakota back in 2005 I found myself wondering if it’s possible to come home to a place you’ve never been before. Everything out here is amplified: the blue of the sky, the warmth of the sun, the sound of the wind… Mornings and evenings are bitterly cold in the fall, but the days are hot. Yesterday in Moose Jaw, I could have have closed my eyes and sworn I was in Las Vegas in June, it was that dryly hot out.

Regina is a nice little city, comparable to Winnipeg. It confirmed to me what it is exactly that makes Winnipeg so special to me as Regina has all the same criteria but one, no strong French community.

The ideal year, it would seem, would be a summer spent in the Prairies, an early fall spent on the Shield, and then a winter somewhere warm and dry.

Which reminds of one final thing about Haven that makes it so remarkable: I have a French community here. While we French-Canadians (them fransaskois, me québécoise) tend to do business in English, if there’s something weighing on us or we’re tired or we’re frustrated or we’re angry, we know we can offload in our mother tongue.

Haven does have four disadvantages. Two would not be an issue if I was here pretty much year round. One is only an inconvenience. And one would be a deal breaker if everything else about Haven wasn’t just about perfect.

The first disadvantage is that the food store in Assiniboia is absolutely terrible. If I was here year round, I would do like my neighbours and grow a garden. I’d have Charles fill a freezer with deer meat. I’d befriend the neighbour who sells organic chickens. I’d do quarterly supply runs to Moose Jaw or maybe Regina, which has a Costco. And I’d stock up in Assiniboia when there are good sales.

The second disadvantage is that while I can get mail addressed to a PO box, I can’t get anything else. A lot of businesses won’t ship to a PO box and insist on using a courier service, with no courier companies currently servicing my hamlet. Purolator is examining the possibility of changing its Assiniboia to Willow Bunch route to go through the hamlet as that would actually be a cost savings for them. But for right now, when I absolutely cannot avoid dealing with a supplier who won’t ship to a PO box, I have things shipped to a neighbour’s place of work in Assiniboia. If I was here year round, I’d make a deal with a business in Willow Bunch.

The third disadvantage is that I’m 2.5 hours away from the airport and there’s really no way for me to get there and back under my own steam. I’m always going to have to find someone to at the very least drive me to Assiniboia to grab a bus or to pick me up in Assiniboia. That’s not a huge deal when I have friends who work in town every day. And for my upcoming trip, C&C offered to drive me right to Regina! So the airport isn’t convenient, but it’s not a huge pain to get to.

The fourth disadvantage is, of course, the lack of internet access. When I add everything up, it makes more sense to me to fight for internet access than to start all over somewhere else where I will be unhappy and have even more to complain about. I know I will get this figured out. It won’t happen overnight, not when we have been totally forgotten in all technology development plans in this province, but I’ll find the key to getting it done.

My Haven is a truly special place. As I have said many times, it is a well of infinite energy from which I can draw when I feel drained. It is the only place on this planet that is mine. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t put down solid roots very often. I tend to be happy somewhere for a few months, maybe even a few years, and then I’m ready to move on to that greener pasture around the bend. Well, I’ve traveled enough of this country to know that there is no greener pasture around the bend. This is it for me in Canada. So if I can’t work here, of course I’ll go somewhere else, but it won’t be in this country. And yet, no matter where I go, however many sunsets I enjoy in foreign lands, I will always know that I can come back here to rest and be renewed.

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This is the view to the west on my way to my water hydrant. I catch the beautiful sunsets over these hills from the passenger side window in my office.