June 9th

THE DETAILS:

WEATHER: C---O---L---D !!! It was only 45 degrees this morning when I got up with a slight wind. Why are we driving north??? Okay, enough whining! It warmed up quickly, it’s partly sunny and a good day to travel. The high today was 60 with mostly cloud cover with the sun permeating through.


DISTANCE: We left Colonsay, Saskatchewan at 10:30. We arrived Vermillion, AB at 5:30. 7 hours of driving and 252 miles.


Okay, so last night our “Prairie Schooner” got a good washing. It took Gary from 9:00 pm to 10:30 to get it back looking white again. Can you believe that he worked the whole time in daylight?? The sun set as he came in for dinner. The area is so flat and full of farm land that you can see a campground a mile away! Whenever you see a clump of trees in the middle of a field…. Yep…. There’s the campground!

After we got on our way this morning we stopped by a “Husky’s” trucker stop in Saskatoon. Gary deserved a good breakfast after all his work last night and they had a good internet connection. Dan, you are awesome!! That map is sooo cool. Now if we get lost we can refer to your thumbtacks!! LOL. BTW, can I hear 2 thumbs up from you because I now know how to post pictures to the blog! It was a little tedious and I needed a nap after the ordeal but I think I got the hang of it. Now I need to figure out how to correct that side way’s picture. Hmmm. WIFI is getting a little harder to find as we drive north so if you don’t hear from us, you’ll know why.

Saskatoon got it’s name from a Cree Indian who brought a colonist leader, John Lake, a handful of purple berries that grew in abundance alongside the Saskatchewan River. Lake was so taken by the fruit that he named the city after them. So today, before leaving the area we treated ourselves to a slice of traditional Saskatoon pie! It looked a bit like blueberries but tasted more like elderberries. It didn’t have much taste. Nothing to…. “write home to mother about”, as my dad would say.

Rick, I wish you were right about the 8 mpg. The times I record are including stops along the way and we’re only traveling at 50-55 mph. It is Gary’s “thorn in the flesh”. He has tried multiple ways to achieve better gas mileage much to his dismay. One time we actually did get 8 mpg but mostly we get an average of 7. He is ready to dump the water out of our reserve tank to, “lighten the load”!! I reminded him that we are heading into British Columbia and then the Yukon Territories where there will be nothing for miles!!

We achieved 2 milestones today on making our way north. (1) We left Saskatchewan and crossed into Alberta and (2) we crossed another time zone. We are now in Mountain Standard Time which puts us 2 hours behind you. As we pulled into the town we are staying in tonight we were pleasantly surprised that it is a modern looking place. Our campground is in a provincial park which we are finding to be pretty well kept camps. They are a little pricier though. Our site is on a hill with little room between RV’s but the terrain is green, not farmland, and there are trees, not forest but definitely greener than we’ve seen for the past couple of days. There’s actually a college about a mile from where we’re staying but….. NO INTERNET!!! Can you believe it??