August 21 – Rivers to Tilebrook Provincial Park (Alberta)

That was a lot of driving - about 925km in all! But we wanted to make up for the lost day due to the breakdown, so we decided last night that today would be a heavy driving day. I think we have more or less made up for the lost time, of course including the fact that we did not see Winnipeg or Saskatoon.

We passed through the entire province of Saskatchewan today (and an hour or so in each of Manitoba and Alberta). A pretty good chunk of the prairies – zoom! – in one day. It seems pretty incredible to do that after biking through it. I had it in mind that we were going to be spending a bunch of time here. It is strange to make such rapid progress. It is also strange that when we hit the Alberta border I felt we were getting very close to home! Everything’s relative.

The landscape was beautiful, though slightly different than on the way through. It has been around 2 months since we came through and the crops have aged, and dried out! There was a lot more green last time, now it was brown and even golden. I have never seen so much crop land before, so close to harvest time (some was being harvested). I now understand the expression “a sea of wheat” as the tops of the wheat shafts do blur into almost a liquid form as the wind pushes them along, and the little rolling hills form the contours of waves.

The list of products of this land is quite impressive – we passed through huge sections of wheat, potatoes, canola, cattle ranches, sunflower, and also oil fields, and some salt mines! We also saw a pronghorn (a.k.a. antelope) standing in a field. Too bad he wasn’t moving – they are the second fastest land animal in the world, behind the cheetah.