At Blue Lake
Provincial Park on Thursday we dined on honey mustard chicken, spiced couscous and black
beans cooked over our one burner stove.
Since Liam and Kai have become vegetarians, Eric and I got dibs on the
chicken, except for the two little pieces that Kai had just to taste it. And the other two pieces he had after
that.
The next morning we
saw a bald eagle flying over the treetops near the lake. The eagles are thick as flies around here. You practically have to elbow your way
through them just to go for a swim.
We had a long day’s
drive to Carberry, Manitoba which is very flat.
It’s so straight and flat that I tried taking my hands off the wheel and
found that I could go quite a ways before driving into the ditch. So I got a lot done while driving – talked to
Eric, pondered the wisdom of my life’s choices, looked for ice cream
signs. Braided my hair, folded the
laundry, wrote my book chapter. Ok, not
really but it was two days of straightaway with lots of big sky. It was a bit like being in a Flintstone cartoon
where the background scenery strip changes from wheat to hay to cows to horses and
back to potted plants.
Saturday night we stayed
at Spruce Woods Provincial Park and then took off for Swift Current,
Saskatchewan where we stayed in a Best Western.
After all the camping, sleeping in a hotel was odd. We missed the breeze and the crickets and the
nearness of trails and lakes and trees. Kai
woke up in the middle of the night and told me he was going outside to look at
the stars.
There is, however, something
quite lovely about sleeping in a bed.
And swimming in a hotel pool turned up to 84 degrees.
Liam and Kai have been
reading the Little House on the Prairie series in the car.
Some parts are more interesting
than others.
It's great to be reading about life on the prairie while actually on the prairie. It’s odd to be hurtling across the prairie in a horseless carriage with the railroad already built, the locusts and wolves alive only as stories, and the
grasslands reconstituted as a vast outdoor food factory.
We stopped in Tompkins at a reconstruction of
a sod house so that Liam and Kai could see what Laura, Mary, Ma, Pa, Carrie, and Grace might have lived in.
Sunday we arrived at
the Canadian Rockies and camped at Waterton Lakes.
-Juliet
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