An American in Saskatchewan

So, even though it is just after midnight on Central time, it's 11 PM here in Edmonton, Alberta, where day two of the driving has just ended. Here's the gist of what came to pass.

We began with an overcast and drizzly morning in Winnipeg. The temperature was in the 40s and it just seemed awful. But, by 7 AM, we were all ready to go and started heading out of Winnipeg. The first thing we wanted to do was to get gas since we hadn't filled up since North Dakota yesterday. This was to be my first attempt to purchase gasoline in Canada. Now, somehow in all of my driving to all of my random places, it has always been the case that I've paid at the pump for my gasoline. I've never had to actually go in and pay for the gas. (Except for the one time I was in Boulder, Colorado, and the guy working at the gas station deliberately suspended the transaction because he thought I was shady for some reason...but that's different). So we pulled into a nice looking Petro-Canada with modern pumps and I try to use my Visa card and...it's rejected. So we went down the street to a Shell station, thinking...Shell is an American brand...they'll accept my card. So we pulled up and the pumps have no interface for swiping credit cards or anything. So, for the first time ever, I went inside to pre-pay for the gas. The man asked how much I wanted and, since I had just under a half a tank, I said "ten dollars", completely forgetting the whole conversion to Canadian currency and whatnot. This ten dollars bought me just under a quarter of a tank of gas. Darn it. But it was enough to get us on the road and on our way.

Driving out of Winnipeg, Joe had his first site of the Canadian phenomenon that is Tim Horton's. Tim Horton's is like a Dunkin' Doughnuts sort of place that sells...coffee and doughnuts? But they are more numerous than McDonald's in Canada and are immensely popular. We saw three on our way out of Winnipeg, all of which had lines of cars in the drive through backed up around the building and full parking lots. We kept being amazed... As we left the city, we also stared seeing a lot of A&Ws. We found this odd since they pride themselves as being "American" food. But anyhow, in a lot of the towns we passed through, Tim Horton's and A&W represented the total food available...


We went through the town of Brandon, Manitoba, and I tried again to get gas. This time I pre-paid for $20 dollars and, having not paid attention to how the price of gas had increased after we left the city, this ended up buying me around a third of a tank. Still without a full tank, we crossed into Saskatchewan on our way through that great empty province. Saskatchewan was just as flat as I thought it would be. It reminded me of the flatness of the Oklahoma Panhandle or the rest of the high plains. Or North Dakota. All farm fields and every ten miles or so a small town, always with a very large grain elevator. Each one of these towns had their own "Welcome to..." sign out front, often with very humorous slogans. Joe began cataloging them all in photos while I continued to photograph them after he started driving. Some of our favorites were "Welcome to Davidson. Taste our water." and "Welcome to Craik. The friendliest place by a dam site." I suppose these towns had to come up with something.

After driving for several hours through the farmland we arrived in Regina, the capital and second largest city. Before arriving there, we stopped to get gas at a very rural Esso station outside of town. This time I did some math in the car and (since the tank was 3/4 empty and the price was right at a dollar a liter) I put $35 on the pump, which was finally enough to get the needle to go to "Full" when I restarted the car. We didn't spend much time there, partially because it seems like you often have to go into a city to get services instead of just seeing all the restaurants and fuel stations out by the highway. I wanted to take a small detour to the town of Rouleau, Saskatchewan, which is about 15 miles southwest of Regina. It was in this town that the immensely popular Canadian television series Corner Gas was filmed, and they left many of the sets up. Having been a fan of the show for several years but also having to buy the DVDs to watch much of it (until WGN and now YouTube have started showing full episodes), it was a thrill to me to be able to actually be at the Corner Gas (even if they have stripped it down quite a bit) and to see the town of "Dog River", which is what the town is called in the TV show.(You can see their opening credits on YouTube to compare...) It's always quite amazing to be able to step into the world of a TV show and make it real...even if I found this out in the middle of nowhere in Saskatchewan...

We then continued north through the city of Moose Jaw, which is a funny name for a city but I haven't looked into why it is called that. From Moose Jaw, we went the the Qu'assail River valley (a slight break from the flatness) and then proceded a few hours further north to Saskatoon. Saskatoon is the largest city in Saskatchewan and, as Joe described it, the first Canadian city that he had seen that "actually looked and felt like an American city". It had a bypass highway and stores and restaurants fronting the highway and a nice downtown core and everything. A very pleasant city. With several Tim Horton's that still had lines at them, even at 4 in the afternoon. We gassed up again here (this time I discovered I could fill up my tank and then go in and pay...brilliant!) and set out west toward Edmonton.

Saskatchewan remained flat, though we started paralleling the Saskatchewan River which provided a valley to look at. We passed through the towns of North Battleford and Battleford (collectively called on all of the signs, "The Battlefords") and I resumed driving when we arrived in Lloydminster on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. (Lloydminster had an A&W and a Tim Horton's right next to each other.) I bought gas in a few minutes in Lloydminster by filling up the tank and going in to pay for it. I'm getting good at that now.


Alberta suddenly had hills. I don't know what happened, but it's like we crossed the border and then there were hills. There was still a lot of farmland, but many cattle herds started showing up and several oil wells. It started looking a lot like Oklahoma, but an Oklahoma moved to the foothills of the Rockies. This made the drive slightly more scenic, or at least kept the driver occupied. We passed through the town of Vegreville, Alberta, which had several signs billing itself as the home of the "World's Largest Pysanka". We had no idea what a "pysanka" was, so Joe started taking pictures of everything that looked remotely large or out of place that we could see from the road. It turns out that a pysanka is one of those highly-decorated Ukranian Easter Eggs and they have a large statue of one in Vegreville. Who knew.

We got into Edmonton this evening and checked into our Super 8 on the far side of town. It was still light at 10 PM here...we're getting to be far north. Edmonton looks like a very, very large city (it has over half a million people in it) with a very nice skyline and many oil refineries. There were some hot air balloons over the city as we drove in and it looked very pleasant. It also had a lot of traffic. But we're here now and looking forward to tomorrow. Tomorrow we really start leaving civilization, heading north and seeing mountains for the first time. We've already switched over to Mountain time, but I have yet to see a mountain. Once we see them, they'll follow us all the way to Alaska. The Alaska Highway itself will start on tomorrow's drive in Dawson Creek. Lots happening...