New Year's Trip. Day 1. Part I

Before I begin the description of our trip, forgive me for this brief aside as I'm not sure when I'll have occasion to mention this particular topic again: If any of you are ever passing through Prairie Town, be sure to drive through some of the oldest areas of town and in particular through the residential area on the western side, near the government buildings by the lake. The homes are beautiful and many have their original leaded windows which have a curious and tell-tale glint from their uneven panes that adds to the homes' charm. Tall elm trees lining the streets are lovely to drive under, shading the thoroughfares and giving the neighbourhoods a wonderful green lushness in the summer. Of course, if you are a home owner of one of those lovely homes, as are an aunt and uncle of mine, you have a bone or two to pick with those trees who also drop branches frequently, rain a fine mist of sap down on your home and vehicles in the spring and are frequent targets of insects whose worm-like larvae descend on fine silk-like strands in the hundreds and thousands onto everything, to be walked into, stepped on and squished and to munch munch munch away on the greenery. That said, and as a non-home owner, I still love those trees!

My aunt and uncle were good enough to put us up during our brief stay in Prairie Town when we came to get our truck and we bid them a warm farewell after coffee and breakfast, sad to say goodbye but eager to get on the road and to home. We’ll be back again one day, and hopefully they’ll also be able to pay us a visit here.

About a block or two away, I remembered that I wanted to record the trip’s mileage and so took a snapshot of the odometer at the first red light we stopped at. Note the truck already has a few miles on her but we were sure she was up to the task. I'll post our final odometer reading in the last blog post about the trip for comparison. This also reminds me to tell you that with only a few exceptions, the trip photos were all taken from inside the truck while we were driving so the quality is a bit grainy, there is occasional blurring from the motion of the vehicle and odd splotches in strange places due to dirt or snow on the windshield and windows. Of course, you all wanted to imagine what the trip was like from our perspective, so perhaps this isn't too bad a way to show it to you. If the photos are exceptionally blurry, like the one below, you can just imagine that you're tired and in need of more coffee, as we likely found ourselves at the time.



A few hours later, the sun was just about to rise and light up the prairies. Prairie Town was one of the sunniest places I’ve ever lived in and I always did enjoy the bright winter days. Here is a picture of a prairie field along our route at daybreak just before the sun rose above the horizon.


Hours later we were crossing our first provincial border, which curiously, runs through the middle of the city so that each half is governed by two different provinces, one of which has no sales tax. I can't imagine that stores in the other province/half of town are able to compete very well with the stores on the western side. We took a photo of the small sign indicating the provincial border as we passed over it and through an intersection. (The wee green sign in the top right of the photo.)



We also discovered that if you want a clean Canadian loo, this town (or at least one half of it) is the place to, erm, go.


The landscape changed again as we travelled north into aspen parkland. Now the agricultural fields were regularly (and increasingly) interspersed with woodlots and aspen forests, full of usually small, knobby aspen trees, unlike the tall stately aspens that are logged in the transition zones of the boreal forest and which we would see cut and loaded on logging trucks for a few of the following days.


As we chugged our way into one of Canada’s major cities (photo below)


we were dismayed to discover that there were no gas stations lining the highway, which we had expected. A tiny sign indicated a gas station nearby and so joined by a few other vehicles, we ventured off the highway and down a narrow country road to fill up at a small gas station a few kilometres away. An old man in a tiny grey car who had joined the caravan played frogger with the transport trucks and zipped across the highway, his life preserved only by his car obeying exactly his command to accelerate. Knowing Red to be slow but steady, we bided our time and crossed when it was safe, hoping not to encounter a crumpled grey car farther down the road.

As we passed through the city, I was sure that I had spotted an old acquaintance of mine from home in the east. It’s a funny thing that when I travel, I am always prepared to run into people I know, even though I’ve no reason to expect to see them and never do. Perhaps it is just that while travelling (and particularly through airports), one passes so many people, that one is bound to see familiar faces that look similar to people we actually know. Perhaps that was it but knowing that this person had actually moved to this city recently, gave this encounter at least a chance of more than zero on the probability scale!

If you happen upon this blog, Rex, were you driving a white or silver car with the first three digits of your license plate RJB at 4:30 pm on January 3, 2008 in Edmonton? We were in a big old reddish maroon truck. You and I locked eyes for a second and then I watched you merge from the north, briefly join us on #16 and then zip across a few lanes of traffic to exit at a left turn to head south, somewhere just east of 170 St. If it wasn’t you, you have a twin more used to city driving than ManNorth or me!!