Saskatoon

I wish I had time to share all the pictures I took of Saskatoon, but I have to be out of this site by 11! :( Every other place I've stayed, checkout has been a much more civilized 12 o'clock.

At any rate, let me take you back to Regina one last time, to the set of 'Laundry Day On the Prairie':



Even though I haven't blogged about it since I bought it, I've been using and absolutely adore my Wonderwash. I use it to keep on top of the cleaning of small items like dish cloths. The machine cleans things beautifully. I should have taken a before and after picture of one of the cloths I cleaned; it was so filthy after washing a BBQ grill that I thought it would have to become a rag. My Wonderwash got it back to brilliant white! At any rate, I woke up Thursday to discover that Ms. Tabitha had been sick all over the bed. Yay. Not. I decided to wash the sheets in the Wonderwash. This was not as tedious an endeavour as one might imagine even though it took about an hour. The sun was shining so hard that I barely had to wring anything out; within an hour everything was bone dry.

The owners came by at one point because someone had told them that a tenant had strung a clothesline, an apparent no no. They laughed when they saw I'd strung the line from one of Miranda's mirrors to a utility pole. That was fine; the no no is to string a heavy line between their precious tiny poplars. I can't believe that I can believe that some idiots would have done that. Me, I'm good at improvising. :)

Croft will be happy to see a white hose in this picture. I had to use my green hose for black tank related matters back in Manitoba, so since I needed a new hose anyway, I made it a point to look for a white one. I hate it, it leaks at the connection where it screws to the tap and Canadian Tire won't take it back. I'll have to fix it next time I stop; thankfully I have the parts to do that.

So, Saskatoon. I'm going to have to move here since it hosts my dream home!



I decided that the only thing I absolutely had to do in Saskatoon was the Western Development Museum's '1910 Boomtown':



It's fantastic!!! The museum is a recreation of a street in a circa 1910 Saskatchewan town:





You can go into each building and see a typical commerce, service, or home from the period.

That took up the entire morning. As I was coming out, the lady at the admissions counter 'had' to introduce me to her other colleague as 'the gal RVing across Canada with her two cats.' Without prompting, she then told me I had to visit the University of Saskatchewan campus and pulled out a map showing me a walking route I could take. That sounded fantastic. I needed the exercise and I wasn't in the mood for more museums.

The walk was quite long, about 7.5km, if I reckon correctly, and was breath taking. I started at the Saskatoon Weir (dam) and climbed up to the CPR Bridge.



I discovered here that there is no way I am ever going to be able to make it up the Eiffel tower. The stairs are metal mesh that you can see through. I barely made it to the top, and that's because I finally had the smarts to close my eyes. The view from the top was breathtaking, but I couldn't get off that bridge fast enough. If a train had come by as I crossed, as one did an hour later when I was safely on the ground, a rescue crew would have been needed to get me moving again!

Look at how high up it is!!!



Once I got across to the U of S campus, the daring bridge crossing was all worth it. I got some fantastic shots of Saskatoon, of which this is one:



It was past lunchtime when I got back to my car, so I decided to head to the 'trendy' Broad Street area to scope out a place for a nice lunch, which I found at the Broad Street diner, where they have some amazing fries. Just off Broad Street I found a used bookstore with an owner who is quiiiiiite the character. He talked my ear off about how people today, especially politicians, know nothing about our history. I'd picked up a book on ancient Egypt and he told me I could have it free if I bought the autobiography of Nellie McClung, a suffragette, which he had seen me pick up (and put back down because it was pricey). I hesitated just long enough for him to offer me an even better deal, so I walked out with both books. In my defense, there were so many books on my 'wish list' in that store that if I was still living in a real house I could have easily bought a couple dozen!!!

Since I still have that nasty cold (better today, thank you), I was pretty exhausted by this point, so I went home to do laundry and come up with something fun to do in the evening.

The Saskatchewan activities guide mentioned boat tours, but that these tours stop on Labour Day weekend. That said, I'd found the launch for these tours on my walk and a sign there seemed to indicate that there would be a tour at 7PM. A quick phone call confirmed that, so off I went after dinner for a 1 hour cruise up and down the Saskatchewan River. It wasn't a particularly good cruise in that we had to get any information we wanted from a brochure that was given to us. The brochure was great, but it's hard to read and look at the scenery at the same time! That said, it was a lovely hour on the water and the weather was mild. Unfortunately, my pictures didn't turn out, but this one is just about salvageable:



I'll have to see about getting more of my Boomtown pics onto a site like Flickr. Anyhoo, I have to be off within the next hour. I'm Alberta bound! Tonight's destination: the Walmart in Lloydminster, a border city of which one part lies in Alberta and the other in Saskatchewan! Tomorrow, I'll get to Edmonton.