One more sleep!

On Tuesday morning, as we stood in the grimy front office of Speedy in Ottawa, waiting to pay for our shiny new rear brakes, a middle aged Chinese man entered the shop behind us. The gentleman behind the counter told the man he’d be with him in a moment and the Chinese man replied “Don’t rush; patience is a virtue.” At the time, there was a certain humorous irony about the obvious stereotype of an Asian man providing the room with this proverb. (Of course at the time, neither us was finding very much humorous at all..) In the end, this piece of advice proved to be much more prophetic than expected.

Friday was a lot like Christmas Eve Day. We had basically arrived to that thing that we’ve been waiting for, but there’s a full day of waiting left. How frustrating! The drive from Winnipeg to Regina is short (compared to some of our other days) so we slept in until 8am. The hotel we stayed in was in a very old building downtown and we had breakfast in a fascinating restaurant with extremely high vaulted ceilings. While the room left a little to be desired, it did include a hot breakfast, which was some of the first “real” food we’d had on the trip, so we enjoyed it.

We hit the highway around 10:30am, expecting a fairly flat drive. For those of you that have driven across the Prairies, you can likely remember what it’s like. Since neither of us had ever been, we were both rather surprised. Many people describe the experience as “boring” or “dull”. We both found it rather quite interesting. The best description we can provide is that you almost have to experience it to fully appreciate it. Photos allow you to see a slice of what’s around you, but until you’re actually surrounded by the flatness, it’s tough to appreciate. It’s extremely strange to look into the distance at a horizon that exists only because the actual curvature of the earth is inhibiting your ability to see more (that is, there aren’t trees, water or hills/mountains creating the horizon line). Here are some photos we took that we thought were quite interesting:

   

We stopped for lunch in Brandon, Manitoba. It seemed like a very nice town, though there were only two entrances off the highway and each “main drag” had about 5km of traffic backed up to get out of the city due to construction. Also, we’re fairly certain that the dragonfly population there is higher than the human population. It was rather remarkable to watch what looked like hundreds of dragonflies swooping around the stop-and-go traffic. A quick Google search when we hit the hotel told us that the dragonflies eat the mosquitoes and as a result tend to be welcomed. Katie caught two photos of them, but they’re tough to see. In the first photo, look to the left of the left-most telephone pole. In the second photo, there are two to the right hand side of the frame.

  

The pictures don’t really do them justice. Those suckers are almost as big as Charlie!

Here’s a shot of Brandon itself:

When we got back on the road, the flatness continued to amaze us. Here are a few more shots:

  

Off on the sides in the farmland was a yellow flowered crop (neither of us could identify it). The sun shinning down on the yellow flowers created an interesting contrast to the bright blue skies.

Around 2:30pm local time we entered Saskatchewan. It’s interesting to note that Saskatchewan does not observe Daylight Savings. As a result, they are currently matched to Mountain Time (whereas in the fall, they won’t change their clocks, but will be the same as Central Time).

There was a fairly extreme weather system moving north through Saskatchewan as we were travelling west. We started with very clear blue skies, but were approaching some very dark cloud cover. Once we entered under the cover, we were in the middle of an extremely bizarre lighting effect.

A few kilometres behind us, and a few kilometres ahead of us, there were blue skies, but directly above us, there was dark cloud cover. The sunlight from behind and ahead of us illuminated everything around us, even though it was quite dark above us. We tried to capture it in photos, but we may or may not have been successful. Regardless, it’s something we’ll never forget.

A few kilometres later, we were heading towards a massive rain storm. With what felt like infinite visibility to the horizon, we could clearly make out where the storm started and ended.

As you can see, within a few minutes, we were driving into what appeared to be a never-ending wall of grey.

The bad news: we ended up in a torrential down pour. The good news: we didn’t have to worry about another car wash this evening.

  

About ten minutes later, this was what we were looking at:

In the distance, you can see the city of Regina. We are almost 30km away from the city at this point. Amazing visibility.

We started dating in 2000. For the last ten years, whenever a commercial came on TV for the restaurant Red Lobster, Katie would relay the following story:

“This one time, when I was like eight, we ate at a Red Lobster. It was the best restaurant in the entire world. The food was served on golden platters with silver utensils. When the food was served, an entire choir came out to present the food and sang the main chorus from Cats (the Broadway version, obviously). When we were finished, instead of paying for the food, they actually paid us for coming to the restaurant. Some day, we’ll have to go to a Red Lobster!”

Well after ten years, we finally made it to a Red Lobster. Yes, that’s right. We left Halifax to eat seafood in Saskatchewan. Matt is still trying to reconcile how this happened, but it did.

The food was quite tasty, but it was a ridiculous quantity. It was unfortunate that we had no way to reheat our left over food, or we’d definitely have lunch for tomorrow.

After dinner we decided it was time “for us to go get us some culture”. We went to the MacKenzie Art Gallery which is located in the park in the centre of the city. Unfortunately, we could not take photos in the gallery. We spent about an hour inside and it was extremely relaxing and enjoyable. Here are a few pictures from around the gallery. The guy in the orange shirt was a busker that wouldn’t leave us alone.

    

It’s been a long trip so far, but we’ve enjoyed ourselves. We’ve been working on a budget and we’ve accepted a few realities. However, the last two hotel rooms (in Thunder Bay and again in Winnipeg) were pretty serious disappointments. We certainly weren’t expecting the Hilton penthouse in downtown New York, but we hoping for clean. Well tonight, the advice we received Tuesday morning from our Asian friend rang true.

We’re fairly certain that there has to be a mistake, because we’ve most certainly violated our rule from yesterday’s post (that there is an inverse relationship between the awesomeness of the rate and awesomeness of the room). Our rate is awesome, and this room is awesome. So in the end, a little patience on the not-so-great rooms on the first part of the trip appears to have paid off in a big way in the awesome room for our last hotel night. (It’s likely that since this room has furniture and our furniture won’t be in Calgary for about 10 days that this room is probably also nicer than our apartment will be for almost two weeks…) Here’s some photos of tonight’s room (kitty not included):

        

Overall, we’re exhausted and excited. We can’t wait to get to Calgary and get settled. We’re especially looking forward to cooking our own food again soon.

We’ll leave you with a photo of Charlie, who jammed himself between Katie’s seat and the side of the car while driving through Winnipeg this morning and seemed fairly happy with himself.

Love,

k&m

So…uhh…what happened to the hills?

Thursday brought about a trip from Thunder Bay to the bustling metropolis of Winnipeg. We got up early again and started things right with a Breakfast of Champions:

 

Within a few minutes we were bounding along a highway that was quickly flattening out. It was fairly sunny, but not too warm, which made for good driving weather.

 

The lush, dense forests we had been accustomed to were beginning to thin out as we worked on our last few hundred kilometres of the widest province we’d be crossing. It was a fairly drastic change in scenery, especially compared to yesterday’s route. Here’s a shot Katie snapped of the sort of trees we were seeing:

We grabbed a quick lunch in Kenora, Ontario. (Before you read the next statement, try to keep in mind that options in Kenora are rather limited when it comes to restaurants.) Since Matt is such a classy guy who looks after his wife, he splurged for McDonalds at the local Walmart. We know, it’s some pretty high end stuff. Try to contain your jealousy.

Soon after, we entered Manitoba, and what little was left in elevation changes disappeared altogether. Here’s a few examples of what we faced:

  

(The deer crossing in that third one really adds a lot of excitement, doesn’t it?)

We arrived in Winnipeg around 3pm local time, after sitting in about 30 kilometres of construction work leading into the city. Good times.

Now, it’s time for some travelling tips from your Travelling Uncle Matt (for those of you that can’t remember, this guy is the original Travelling Uncle Matt, from Fraggle Rock – credit to Jim Henson & company)

Tip #1: If the rate for your hotel seems really great, it’s probably because the room is really terrible. It’s basically a universal truth that there is an inverse relationship between the awesomeness of your rate and the awesomeness of your room.

Tip #2: Hotels that claim they are “Pet Friendly” are not actually friendly to our furry little buddies. What they mean is that they’ll take your money, then tell you that you have to take a smoking room. This is neither friendly to the guest, nor the pet.

Tip #3: At all costs, keep your wife happy while on the road. If you think it’s bad when she’s cranky at home, you’ll quickly realize that you’ve been mistaken all this time and you’ve never actually experienced cranky until you do when the two of you are 2,500 kilometres from home (or better still, in between homes).

Tip #4: The pictures of that hotel room on the website? They look great because they want them to look great.

Now, let’s tie in all four tips into a single story. We arrived at our hotel in Winnipeg, which we got for a fantastic rate and was “Pet Friendly”. When we checked in, Matt advised that we had a cat (some hotels will charge a $200 cleaning fee if they find out that you’ve had a pet in their rooms without advising them). The girl behind the desk informed him that they’d have to be on a smoking floor. We arrived in the room and instantly knew we had a problem. The smell was horrendous. We left the cat in the room and went out to check out the city (details on that below). When we arrived back, Matt had decided that it was time for action. Using his powers of persuasion Matt convinced the manager to allow us to move to a non-smoking room. Katie believed it was simply that the manager was a reasonable individual. Matt knew it was really his striking good looks.

Finally, we decided to head down to the park and market that’s been built around The Forks here in Winnipeg. Here’s a description of the area:

(In a nutshell, this is where the Red and Assiniboine rivers meet; a natural and historic trading location.)

Here are some more shots from our visit there:

   

There’s a neat little piece of this park where they’ve set up sculptures that correspond to star constellations that come from different cultures (ie: Greek, Chinese, Indian, etc). There wasn’t a very good description, but we surmised that at the right time of the year, and at the right time of the night, if you stood in the centre of the whole installation, and looked at the right sculpture, it would align with the stars in the sky for a specific constellation. Here’s the whole installation:

Here’s one of the sculptures:

Here are a few more shots from the park, including the first shot, which is the new Museum of Human Rights, being built by the Canadian Government:

     

This bridge is a pedestrian-only bridge:

The base houses a restaurant that hangs over the river. We decided to grab dinner there:

This motorcycle was hanging from the ceiling:

Overall, the trip is going well and we’re looking forward to arriving in Calgary on Saturday. We’ll leave you with this shot of Charlie practicing for his stunt work in his upcoming film “Ninja Kitty”:

Love,

k&m