Some gems amidst the plains......

Welcome to Saskatchewan!

Day #4 - Winnipeg, MB - Saskatoon, Saskatchewan  (780 km)

Straight ahead for miles and miles and miles.....

Today was a long haul.  I mean it.  I was bored and napping before we even left Manitoba! Thank goodness Greg thoughtfully took the photo of our entrance into Saskatchewan.  When I was awake I saw a lot of farmland, and I don't mean cutesy little hobby farms like you see in Southern Ontario.  These are gigantic, agribusiness farms. At first it's impressive to see such massive farms and the equipment used on them, some of which are several stories high, and probably worth millions of dollars, but after several hours of the same thing on roads as flat as a board, it gets old.

The prairies

Boredom means that the kids tune to iPads and hand held video games for entertainment, Dear Hubby turns to podcasts, and me, well, I sleep for lack of anything else to do I suppose.  I can't read due to motion sickness, and I don't have any hobby right now that I can do while trapped in the passenger seat of a vehicle moving 120 km/hr.  Well, I do, and that is taking pictures for scrapbooking and blogging purposes, but how many bloody pictures of grain elevators and farming equipment does one need?

Grain elevator

By now you are probably guessing that perhaps I was going a wee bit stir (or rather still) crazy today, and that I am all caught up on any lack of sleep from which I may have suffered in the past year of my life.  While this is true, I would like to shock you with some of our amazing discoveries along the way today, which boosted me from my boredom and brought out the humour in our day.



The first thing we laughed about was the flatness.  Yeah, it got old, but at first it was kind of a novelty compared to where we had been driving over the last few days!  We had a chuckle when we set the GPS for Regina, and the whole way from Winnipeg to Regina was straight.  We joked about the GPS blowing up if we went off course and actually took a turn in a road!  The picture of the yellowish-green hay growing against the blue sky was pretty and we enjoyed that for a while.  We even watched a storm form over the prairieland and as the clouds got darker and darker, the contrast of the golden hay against the dark blue of the clouds was lovely.  Greg noticed that although the clouds were super dark and it was obviously raining in some areas, we did not see any lightening or hear any thunder, which we thought was curious, because these clouds were super dark!  It rained for about 3 minutes later on, just hard enough and long enough to get the bug guts off the window so I could take more pictures.  I think God was really trying to keep me awake at that point in the day!

Another item that came to our attention were the bails of hay.  
Part of this whole agribusiness is hay growing, and we saw more bails of hay today than I had seen in my lifetime prior to today.  Even the kids, who were happily gaming, made different comments about all the hay bails.  Would you believe the farmers actually grow and harvest the hay in between the median of Highway #1?  No, really!  We were shocked when we saw it - and even took a picture to prove that the farmers in Saskatchewan must live by the saying "waste not, want not".


After we toured through Regina a little, saw the provincial parliament buildings, the University of Regina, and some pretty parks in the city, we had supper, and then moved on to our final destination of Saskatoon.  We were on the highway less than three minutes post-supper and we couldn't believe that we had ever been in city of about 200,000 people! (See pic to the left.)


During our post-dinner drive,  I was trying hard not to nod off....again.  After about an hour, we were shocked beyond words when we saw....of all things.....a hill!!  And not just a little slope, this was a hill!  We were thrilled to bits that the road was NOT flat! Afterwards, the road was full of nice hills, and we realized that we had entered the Arm River Valley.  It was like a breath of fresh air, and all of a sudden, we were interested in our surroundings all over again!
As we were driving along, we saw a side road, which would take us right
through the Arm River Valley, and at first we saw that the road had been
washed out.  Further down the road a bit, we saw another road, and we were able to drive right down into the bottom of the valley, and it was amazing! When we looked behind us, we could see the trucks moving along the highway, and they looked like little Hot Wheels we were so deep down in the valley.  The river would have been massive once, but now it is a creek carved into the land, and the road was built over a miniature waterfall.  What a lovely little discovery in the middle of the prairie land! In looking back on it, I think it was a little tap on the shoulder from the universe telling us not to take for granted what is around us, no matter how vast or flat.

Our final chuckle of the day occurred when we saw the sign for the town of Findlater, the hometown for every procrastinator of the world!  I laughed and laughed when I saw this sign and told Greg, "We should go check this town out!" and of course, Greg replied, "Nah, we'll find it later!"

Good night everybody!!  I'll be here all week! Don't forget to tip your server!