September 24, 2008 by Rae

Wild Rose Country

I’m posting from Edmonton, Alberta.

Edmonton

Driving northwest out of Saskatoon on the Yellowhead (16), the landscape begins to ripple and the vast golden expanses of wheat give way to green pastures interrupted by dense poplar copses. By the time you truly enter Alberta, after you’ve passed Lloydminster, you’d think you were back in northern Ontario. But the trees betray your true location, as Alberta along this route has more poplar than it does spruce.

My first night in Alberta was spent in a zoo of a shopping complex in Lloydminster. I was very technically set up in front of a Wal-mart, but, truly, home was squeezed in between a Kelsey’s restaurant and a bank. It was very noisy, crowded, and busy, but provided a good lesson in how far I’ve come in the past few weeks. My first times in such locations, I couldn’t relax and absolutely had to leave the coach. This night, I just got a few groceries to make dinner at home, and then I plopped down with a book for several hours.

I made it to Edmonton around 12:30 on Monday. It had been a miserable morning; rainy, damp, cold, muddy, and windy. Keeping Miranda in her lane had required all my energy. I wanted to go somewhere warm for the afternoon, somewhere I wouldn’t have to think too much, somewhere I could have some exercise.

So, within a half hour of arriving in Edmonton, I was on my way to the West Edmonton Mall.

Now, I have no love for these insane orgies of consumerism. When I went through Minnesota in 2005 I purposely skipped the Mall of America even though I went right by it. But the West Edmonton Mall promised an indoor water park with a wave pool which sounded like just the thing I wanted….

I found the water park and was dismayed by the admission cost of 32$, plus 7$ for a locker rental. I just wanted to swim! I took a chance and asked the lady at admissions if there was perhaps a special fee just for the pool. Not during the week… because access to the whole facility is 17$ since not all the activities are open!

And that’s why I am really beginning to love this life, folks. I woke up Monday in a miserable parking lot, went to bed in a quiet setting surrounded by firs, and in the middle of all that, I spent three glorious hours swimming, body surfing waves, and taking too many exhilarating rides to count down waterslides. Monday was a Good Day.

Yesterday was okay. Everything I really wanted to see in Edmonton is either closed for renovations, closed for the season, or has a drastically reduced program. I did the Royal Alberta Museum in the morning and had mixed feelings about it. The 10$ admission fee felt bloated when I compared the museum to the RSM (2$) and I found the exhibits disjointed and badly organized. But I was able to fall in love with an absolutely adorable little guy (Australian stick bug) and learn about the shipwreck of the Empress of Ireland, which happened on the St. Lawrence River, and which I’d never heard about even though it was comparable in tragedy to the sinking of the Titanic.

I finished up my day early by going to Rutherford House, home of Alberta’s first premiere.

Rutherford House, Edmonton

Admission was 4$ and got me a private guide who was fantastic. I enjoyed touring this Edwardian home, comparing it to Victorian homes I’d toured before. The Edwardian style is a lot more simple, but the paint colours are shockingly bright.

Today, I’m not sure if I’m doing anything touristy. I had wanted to go to Fort Edmonton Park, but it’s shut down for the season and the only thing going on during the week are wagon rides. Later today I’ll go check out if those are worth doing since the park is just minutes from here. I also need to visit an Elections Canada office to get a special ballot to vote by mail as we have an election coming up on October 14!

I’m very tired and the cold I woke up with last Thursday has hardly abated. So, I’m reconsidering my plans for the rest of the week. I was supposed to go to Calgary tomorrow and stay through to Sunday. I think I’m going to blow off the city and come back in the spring.

So, my new tentative itinerary is to make it as far as the Wal-mart in Red Deer tomorrow, the Wal-mart in Calgary on Friday, and then stop in Canmore for a full seven nights as I found a park there that offers a free seventh night for six paid up (making the average cost per night almost reasonable). From there, I could take a day trip into Calgary (1 hour) and day trips into Banff, similar to what I did in Regina. And then from Canmore, I’ll drive, up and down and through the mountains until I reach the Okanagan valley. It’s getting colder up here (there’s frost on the grass outside!) and the Okanagan Valley is starting to sound like the promised land. 🙂

I must also confess that I’m getting too settled into this semi-retired-type routine of mine and that it won’t hurt for me to start making some income again to remind me that there is still a big old world out there. 🙂

September 21, 2008 by Rae

Saskatoon

I wish I had time to share all the pictures I took of Saskatoon, but I have to be out of this site by 11! 🙁 Every other place I’ve stayed, checkout has been a much more civilized 12 o’clock.

At any rate, let me take you back to Regina one last time, to the set of ‘Laundry Day On the Prairie’.

Even though I haven’t blogged about it since I bought it, I’ve been using and absolutely adore my Wonderwash. I use it to keep on top of the cleaning of small items like dish cloths. The machine cleans things beautifully. I should have taken a before and after picture of one of the cloths I cleaned; it was so filthy after washing a BBQ grill that I thought it would have to become a rag. My Wonderwash got it back to brilliant white! At any rate, I woke up Thursday to discover that Ms. Tabitha had been sick all over the bed. Yay. Not. I decided to wash the sheets in the Wonderwash. This was not as tedious an endeavour as one might imagine even though it took about an hour. The sun was shining so hard that I barely had to wring anything out; within an hour everything was bone dry.

The owners came by at one point because someone had told them that a tenant had strung a clothesline, an apparent no no. They laughed when they saw I’d strung the line from one of Miranda’s mirrors to a utility pole. That was fine; the no no is to string a heavy line between their precious tiny poplars. I can’t believe that I can believe that some idiots would have done that. Me, I’m good at improvising. 🙂

Croft will be happy to see a white hose in this picture. I had to use my green hose for black tank related matters back in Manitoba, so since I needed a new hose anyway, I made it a point to look for a white one. I hate it, it leaks at the connection where it screws to the tap and Canadian Tire won’t take it back. I’ll have to fix it next time I stop; thankfully I have the parts to do that.

So, Saskatoon. I’m going to have to move here since it hosts my dream home!

I decided that the only thing I absolutely had to do in Saskatoon was the Western Development Museum’s ‘1910 Boomtown’.

It’s fantastic!!! The museum is a recreation of a street in a circa 1910 Saskatchewan town.

You can go into each building and see a typical commerce, service, or home from the period.

That took up the entire morning. As I was coming out, the lady at the admissions counter ‘had’ to introduce me to her other colleague as ‘the gal RVing across Canada with her two cats.’ Without prompting, she then told me I had to visit the University of Saskatchewan campus and pulled out a map showing me a walking route I could take. That sounded fantastic. I needed the exercise and I wasn’t in the mood for more museums.

The walk was quite long, about 7.5km, if I reckon correctly, and was breathtaking. I started at the Saskatoon Weir (dam) and climbed up to the CPR Bridge.

I discovered here that there is no way I am ever going to be able to make it up the Eiffel tower. The stairs are metal mesh that you can see through. I barely made it to the top, and that’s because I finally had the smarts to close my eyes. The view from the top was breathtaking, but I couldn’t get off that bridge fast enough. If a train had come by as I crossed, as one did an hour later when I was safely on the ground, a rescue crew would have been needed to get me moving again!

Once I got across to the U of S campus, the daring bridge crossing was all worth it. I got some fantastic shots of Saskatoon.

It was past lunchtime when I got back to my car, so I decided to head to the ‘trendy’ Broad Street area to scope out a place for a nice lunch, which I found at the Broad Street diner, where they have some amazing fries. Just off Broad Street I found a used bookstore with an owner who is quiiiiiite the character. He talked my ear off about how people today, especially politicians, know nothing about our history. I’d picked up a book on ancient Egypt and he told me I could have it free if I bought the autobiography of Nellie McClung, a suffragette, which he had seen me pick up (and put back down because it was pricey). I hesitated just long enough for him to offer me an even better deal, so I walked out with both books. In my defense, there were so many books on my ‘wish list’ in that store that if I was still living in a real house I could have easily bought a couple dozen!!!

Since I still have that nasty cold (better today, thank you), I was pretty exhausted by this point, so I went home to do laundry and come up with something fun to do in the evening.

The Saskatchewan activities guide mentioned boat tours, but that these tours stop on Labour Day weekend. That said, I’d found the launch for these tours on my walk and a sign there seemed to indicate that there would be a tour at 7PM. A quick phone call confirmed that, so off I went after dinner for a 1 hour cruise up and down the Saskatchewan River. It wasn’t a particularly good cruise in that we had to get any information we wanted from a brochure that was given to us. The brochure was great, but it’s hard to read and look at the scenery at the same time! That said, it was a lovely hour on the water and the weather was mild. Unfortunately, my pictures didn’t turn out.

I have to be off within the next hour. I’m Alberta bound! Tonight’s destination: the Walmart in Lloydminster, a border city of which one part lies in Alberta and the other in Saskatchewan! Tomorrow, I’ll get to Edmonton.

September 20, 2008 by Rae

Regina and the RCMP Heritage Centre

Monday had me at Wascana Lake, in the heart of Regina. It’s surrounded by greenery and has paths along its banks for running, biking, walking, etc. There are a lot of tourist attractions in this area.

Then, the Regina Cemetery. There was a whole section devoted to the graves of children.

There is a native prairie grass garden growing right outside the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. Most of these plants no longer grow naturally as the prairie ecology has been changed to accommodate agriculture.

Now on to Wednesday, which was devoted to touring the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Heritage Centre located right on the site of Depot, where all Mounties get their training. The site has a museum that is well worth the visit and visitors are also allowed to wander the grounds of Depot provided they follow the blue Mountie road.

All the buildings at Depot are in the same style of red brick and sandstone.

Finally, if there’s one nice thing I can say about the RCMP it’s that they sure do know how to put on a show.

I was surprised that I was allowed to take the pictures and videos that I did. Must have something to do with the RCMP’s desperate need to improve their public image and seem more transparent.

September 20, 2008 by Rae

Moose Jaw

Moose Jaw is an easy fifty minute drive from the campground where I stayed, so let’s say about forty minutes from Regina proper. I’m so glad I did the town as a day trip rather than moving on to it with the coach. Those five nights I spent in one location really helped me recoup some energy!

I left for Moose Jaw around quarter to 8, getting into town just before 9, only to learn that the town opens late! Thankfully, I found a coffee shop and was able to kill some time there before 10, when the Tunnels of Moose Jaw ticket office opened.

Moose Jaw’s tunnels are the stuff of legends. Please visit the website to get some more information on their history. They were originally built as a way for steam engineers to easily access the boilers that provided the steam which heated the city, but they soon became the domain of sweatshops and bootlegging. These two topics were the subject of the tours available.

The first tour I went on took me on a Chinese immigrant’s journey upon arrival in Canada at the turn of the 19th century. The Chinese immigrant experience at that time is a true black mark on Canadian history. The tour very effectively conveys the exploitation and degradation these immigrants were subject to. There wasn’t a dry eye in the group when we got back to the surface.

The second tour is about Moose Jaw’s connection with Chicago during the Prohibition era. This tour was very entertaining, but was based on conjecture (that Al Capone might have sought refuge at times in Moose Jaw) and didn’t really provide that much historical information other than to set Moose Jaw as being the place for debauchery at the time. It was nice to finish up with that one, but if you can only take one tour, I recommend the Chinese one.

There’s a small heritage museum at the library, which I toured, then I bought a brochure outlining the steps for a self-guided tour of the town. The temperature in Moose Jaw on Tuesday was torrid. I can only compare it to my experience of Las Vegas in June. A real 30 degrees, not a 30 degrees with humidity. I couldn’t keep myself hydrated, so I knew that I was going to be cutting the day short.

Every single street light in downtown Moose Jaw has a voice that in tones: “The WALK light to cross XXX Street is now on. The WALK light to cross XXX Street is now on. The WALK–” It got to be very annoying, especially in the afternoon when I was trying to take photographs of various buildings and the heat was sapping all my patience. It reminded me of the annoying elevator voice at my job that calls out each floor.

There’s an extension on the back of the building for the police station. This addition perfectly matches the style of the old post office.

Moose Jaw came off as a charming, but faded, town. It had a grimy, sun bleached quality to it. Downtown is just a few blocks square and is very walkable. There’s a lovely park called Crescent Park, right in the middle of town, with a casino and spa on its edges. There are a lot of things to do in the environs, so if I’d had more time and had gone to Moose Jaw with the coach for a few days, as I’d initially planned, I would have had plenty to do.

Why ‘Moose Jaw’? The accepted theory is that the town is named after the Moose Jaw river, which has a bend that looks like the jaw of a moose!

September 9, 2008 by Rae

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

When last our heroine updated her blog, she was parked at the Canadian Tire in Val D’Or. She has done more than 900km since then… and not all of them have been above ground.

Not much happened on Saturday. I wound up boondocking outside the visitor’s centre at the eastern edge of the city where I was told overnighting was ‘tolerated’, but I’d have to move to pay site or the Walmart for the next night. The only pay site in town was 15$ and that didn’t include hookups or, at least, a view, so guess where I spent my second night in Val D’Or? 🙂

At any rate, the sole purpose of my visit to Val D’Or was to see the gold mine at a complex they call the Cité de l’or. Other than outdoor sports, there isn’t much to see or do in Val D’or. I therefore wouldn’t recommend making a detour there just to see the mine, but if you just happen to be going by, then, please, don’t miss it and pay the 40 bucks for the full tour!

A vein of gold does not look like what you’d expect as it is black and white. The white is quartz and the black is tourmaline. This is extracted and then processed to get the gold flakes inside. It takes about 5,000 tonnes of ore from this mine to get a single oz of gold.

There was nothing but wilderness around the mine site, so a village had to be built to house all the workers and their families. Imagine a whole neighbourhood of log cabins.

The old mining village is just adorable and is a historic site, so current owners face strict regulations as to how much they can change the houses.

These houses offered excellent accommodation for the miners with running water, heating, telephones, and electricity. Miners were considered rich. They made about 35$ a week while a living wage was about 5$ per week! This is how they could afford such luxuries and pay the rent of 50$ per year for these houses.

Before my tour of the mine, I walked through the village and was accosted by a withered wraith of a man who used to work at the mine! He spent about twenty minutes sharing his life story. I thought it would be a tale of woe, but not at all. He loved his time at the mine, saying that the work was hard, but that conditions were good and safe, and that unlike coal mining it wasn’t that bad for the health as there was no dust. His job was to take core samples that would be analysed to determine which way the mine should be further excavated. When he retired from mining, he used his knowledge to found his own diamond drilling company with more than 150 employees. Meeting him proved to me that there are no accidents in life. I was sure my mine tour was at 1PM, but it was at 1:30. I therefore had time to kill, time enough to make an encounter that completely change how I felt down there, 300ft below the surface….

I really don’t like enclosed spaces, so the hour and a bit we were underground was just enough for me. When we got back into the shuttle for the drive back up, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I can’t imagine spending a whole day in such a place, including a lunch break spent in a room that was literally carved out of the rock face.

elevator cage

indicates at which level is the elevator

elevator cage speed regulator

dispensary

door into the room where the cage is

drilling cage; miner’s liked these because they were safe and cut down on their labour

electrical panel controlling the elevator cage

horrible joke

ladder to the drilling platform

lunchroom!

me as a miner!

mining drill that can be driven forward, backward, or sideways

outside of the mine

99 Perrault (the house where the interior pictures were taken)

miner’s cabin

luxurious bathroom in the miner’s house

dresser in the miner’s house

calendar for 1943

chamberpot in the miner’s house

cheques

newspaper about the FLQ crisis

food stamps

hats belonging to the wife of a miner

ice box in the miner’s house

this gift shop area was the kids’ bedroom in the miner’s house

kitchen in the miner’s house

miner’s outfit

phone in a miner’s house

radios, adding machine, magazine

wartime ration coupons

rock chute

the shuttle we took down into the mine

ceiling sprayed with concrete for the visitors’ safety

gold vein, the black is tourmaline and the white is quartz

After the tour, I went to pick up Miranda at the Sears where I’d received permission to park her for the day, then we moved to Walmart. The store was closed, so I just set up for the night and treated myself to dinner since I couldn’t get anything working at home. 🙂

Miranda at the Walmart in Val D’Or

Sunday, I pushed off ludicrously early (around 7) and felt my mood change as quickly as did the kilometres beneath me.

I passed this very cool sign mid-morning:

entering the Arctic watershed

The weather was (and is) gross, not motivating me to try to find a boondocking spot on Crown land as I’d thought I might, so I decided to make a push for the Walmart in Kapuskasing:

Seeking a Walmart in the wilderness

(I was just amused that I was driving through the wilderness looking for a Walmart).

I passed some very interesting towns, such as Swastika and Moonbeam, where I had to take a picture:

yes, we’re still on Earth (and staying there)

When I got to Kapuskasing (and was done with the whole dumping thing), I went to the Walmart figuring that it would be closed for the evening. Nope, it’s open 7 to 8 seven days a week!!! So, I went in to ask for permission to stay overnight. The manager replied “Of course!” in a very friendly manner. I knew I would have a good night there: I had permission to stay and the OPP had a station literally across the street. Can’t get any safer than that! I wound up sleeping the sleep of the proverbial dead and woke up this morning at 5:30 feeling very odd because I haven’t slept that many hours straight through since I was a teenager!

Today was another big push as there is just about nothing between Kapuskasing and Thunder Bay. I was very glad to find this park. It’s nothing special and not a place where you can set up your hibachi or awning, but it’s perfectly adequate for a one night stopover. Tomorrow, I’m going no further than the Walmart in Thunder Bay! I have this site until noon and I plan to take advantage of that to get caught up on my housekeeping.

If there is one thing I will remember the most about my first days on the road it is that the world is not nearly as hostile a place as some people would try to make me believe. There has been at least one person per day who helped me in a way that might have seemed small to them, but which made me feel like I am not alone on this vast and open road.

Tomorrow is Thunder Bay. Wednesday will be my last night on the Shield. Thursday I’ll hit the Prairies. And then I’ll slow down properly as I’ll be hitting new things.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. Good lives, I’m discovering, have no shortage of bad days, but they are measured by the sum of the whole.

I’m impossibly happy, in good spirits, comfortable in my rig, grateful that my cats have taken to this life as well as their mom, and have discovered that it’s easy to be a morning person if your day is going to be filled with adventure.

A Life By Design

"Sometimes in life, we reach to a right place by departing from a wrong port with a wrong ship!" ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

History Museums

Wild Rose Country

Saskatoon

Regina and the RCMP Heritage Centre

Moose Jaw

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!