So we decided to drive south in search of warm weather. Well, it turns out that we just needed to drive east because Alberta and Saskatchewan have had glorious weather for the past two weeks.
This being our first trip of this kind in a new trailer, we’ve learned a lot of useful things, including:
- If you’re going to forget anything at home, it will be the stuff that requires a prescription
- Picking up a 27 foot trailer at a suburban dealership in a city you don’t know when the person who sold it to you is 1000 kms away in a different city is a bad idea
- Like the first subject in any experiment, the first campground you stay in will be strange
- Google maps doesn’t distinguish gravel roads from highways and helpfully calculates the route with the shortest distance
- In Saskatchewan, the gravel roads are better than the paved roads; the citizens of Saskatchewan really should take this up with our Sunny Leader
- We can use most of our monthly data allowance in a couple of weeks following our obsessions with US politics, the BC election, and the playoffs (go Sens go)
- National Parks employees are first and foremost university students, who should not be trusted when they tell you that a campground that is under construction can be used for camping
- If you’re going to pull hard on a part in a new trailer that seems to be stuck, you should be less than 45 km away from the nearest hardware store
- Always take the guided tour, always fill up with gas when you pass a station, and definitely strike up a conversation with the friendly guy who just might turn out to be a former MLA and local history expert
Our first stop was Dinosaur Provincial Park, which is a World Heritage Site because of the enormous cache of dinosaur bones contained there. We hiked the hoodoos, and encountered one of those ‘bad hombres’ that Trump is so concerned about (aka Julian):
Then we were off to the Cypress Hills, which were just as hot and dry as they look in this picture:
Looking south toward Montana
Our standout favourite so far has been Grasslands National Park, which is located on the border between Saskatchewan and Montana. The land isn’t flat as you’d expect, but low and rolling, and covered in long grasses that ripple in the wind. Our campground was near Frenchman River, which is a favourite breeding ground for rattlesnakes.
We saw a lot of antelope, bison and prairie dogs that ‘air kiss’ when they meet each other, but no rattlesnakes, thankfully. Julian has a very flattering picture of me in ‘snake gaiters’ which sadly is on his phone, so I can’t share it with you…
