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