2004/08 Yukon trip - The road home - |
|||||
We were heading east on county roads across flat farming country through little towns with names like Cereal. There was nowhere to camp until we reached the Saskatchewan border where there was a “Welcome to Alberta” campground. We were the only occupants.
Monday 13th September
Monday was more of the same except that Saskatchewan is even flatter that Alberta. We were on very quiet country roads, south of Saskatoon and north of Regina. We stopped in Rosetown to transfer cash into the starving student’s bank account, and then continued east on even quieter roads. Some of these were gravel, and some carried warning signs of “broken road”, and we were exercising that graunching noise on every bump, but we still made good time. We hoped that there’d be another free “Welcome” campground at the Manitoba border, but the border is at the Assiniboine River, so there are only expensive “resorts” and “lodges” there. We ended up at the town campground in Roblin on a little lake, just inside Manitoba.
Tuesday 14th September
The Manitoba scenery is quite different from Saskatchewan in this area. There are more hills and trees 
and hedges, and even some sheep farms. We continued east to Dauphin and then went south to Riding Mountain national park. This is part of the Manitoba Escarpment, what used to be the western shore of glacial Lake Agassiz. After hundreds of miles of prairie, 
the escarpment is an impressive sight, but I think that “mountain” name is a bit of an overstatement! Most of the park is a few hundred feet above the prairie, high enough for a mixed forest to thrive. The birch trees had changed to yellows and oranges, and there were a few red maples. The park is just over a hundred miles from Winnipeg and probably busy in summer, but there were few other visitors on this day. We saw a few coyotes and also found ourselves in the middle of a bison herd for a while.
We left the park and headed south towards the US border. At sunset we pulled into Turtle Mountain provincial park right on the border. This is another part of the Manitoba Escarpment. Once again we were the only people in the park.
Wednesday 15th September
In the morning I walked a couple of very wet trails on a cold cloudy morning and found the beach on Adam Lake, probably a popular spot on a hot summer’s day. I had the beach to myself. It was a short drive from the park to the US border. We thought about visiting the Peace Garden at the border but passed it by, hoping to get to Alexandria by evening.
Every vehicle going through the border was being searched, but it was a very perfunctory search. I don’t think the guard even noticed the cargo pod on the roof or the boxes full of rocks or the bags full of electronic gear. Maybe he was just looking for filet of Manitoba mad cow.
North Dakota also looked very green for September and it was raining again. We drove east just south of the border on empty roads until we joined the equally empty I-29 on its way south from Winnipeg to Fargo. We called our friend Barb and yes she’d be home, so we abandoned our “go slowly” and “no freeways” resolutions and blasted the 250 miles to her place on Lake Ida. Barb cooked us a great dinner and we caught up on each other’s news. As usual on this trip, we camped on the driveway. We said goodbye to Barb as she would be off at 5.30 next morning to go collect her grandson Anthony. Annie and Sean were off for the weekend to a football game in Colorado.
Thursday 16th September
The rain had stopped and it was a glorious sunny day as we drove through “Lake Wobegon” country to Little Falls and then headed down highway 10 towards home. The news was full of reports on the floods in the south of the state around Austin and Albert Lea.
Back home, Michael and Christina were both off at college classes. We stepped over a mixture of tree parts and car parts on the driveway. Things were a little better inside. Christina had obviously done some recent cleaning up, and most of the house was in working order.
It was great to see them all again, but it was going to be tough to get used to living in a house again.