Cross Canada '07: Day 15

Sept. 14 - Day 15 (Two weeks!?!?!)

Let me start this off with a big thanks to Gayle and Frank LeBlanc, Colleen's aunt and uncle in Calgary. We called 2 days ahead to see if they wanted to get together when we went through Calgary and they offered a fabulous dinner and having us stay the night with them (breaking the string of 9 consecutive nights in a tent and 20 nights in a sleeping bag). Dinner was great; all of Frank and Gayle's kids (Danielle, Nikki and Jean-Marc) were there with their kids and soon to be kids. It was great meeting everyone. I'm still not hungry after experiencing Gayle's "need to feed". Thanks to both of you.

So we're in Winnipeg (woohoo! the Peg!) staying with Dave White of Western/UBC/Ultimate Frisbee fame. Big thanks to him too! It was awesome catching up with him and many laughs were had when the picture of the real "Full House" house came out. We didn't really intend to get through Saskatchewan that fast, but it's not that wide. After leaving Calgary we went to Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, about 50 km north of Swift Current, on Lake Diefenbaker. Whoever said Saskatchewan was boring doesn't know what they're talking about.

It was a gorgeous drive and surprisingly the terrain was quite varied (it didn't vary up very often, but there were quite a few, what I'll call, crevasses deep enough for full grown trees to hide in and almost make it up to road level).

The wildlife changed pretty much instantly (porcupines, antelope, vultures eating skunks and loose gravel) upon entering the province and "The Land of Living Skies" lived up to it's name. The campsite was gorgeous, pretty much right on the lake, and very empty.

There were no bugs, just the odd cow mooing in the distance. We spent a while at night, laying on the beach, watching the galaxy open up above us, catching glimpses of shooting stars and what was either a pair of satellites in the exact same orbit or UFOs (cue X-Files music).

We left Saskatchewan Landing on Tuesday and headed to Little Manitou Lake to check out a lake with the same mineral concentration as The Dead Sea. We didn't really know what to expect from the lake and, due to the cold, only sat on the beach and tried floating our legs in the actual lake and opted to spend more time in the indoor, heated mineral pool in the hotel. It was amazing. It was actually hard to sink in it. You could tread water without moving your arms or legs, just bobbing there, completely vertical. It also made for a spectacular race across the deep end of the pool (won by myself!) that may have startled the rest of the occupants of the pool (The Tour Bus Crowd) whom likely had an average of a 40-50 year head-start on us (but who cares, I won!). It was as if there was no resistance in the water. We swam faster using just our arms than we would have in a normal pool using our legs as well. The water had a rather "whisky-brown" colour to it which was, at first, slightly disconcerting but afterwards we found it had infact healed our "wounds". Skin became quite soft and strangely my aching muscles ached just a little less. On Wednesday, the weather changed to something entirely familiar to us, drizzling rain and has stayed that way since.

We were entirely surprised when we crossed the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border. We hadn't properly said good-bye to Saskatchewan (sniff, sniff). We were also surprised by the almost instant change in terrain. We went from fields of wheat to forests and lakes literally at the border. And the city names got funnier too.

We stopped that night in Dauphin (The Sunshine City!) in the rain (how appropriate). We had wanted to get a little further that day, but it was dark and we saw the ever welcoming camping sign on the side of the road. We turn into what looks pretty much exactly like a city park with a bunch of spots, in the middle of a grassy area, for RV's. It was rather empty, so we pitched the tent in the rain and enjoyed Manitoba (cue grumbling). There was a little river running through the park called the Dead River. I'm sure if we'd been there a month earlier we'd have been carried away by mosquitos. (Lots of stagnant water)