Our Trip to Canada

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June 8^th, 2008: Day 3

We woke up early for breakfast on June 8^th, which was basically some cereal and orange juice (better than nothing). When everything had been cleared out of our room, we decided to continue on our way to Saskatoon… and I was the designated driver this time.

The drive in Canada is very flat most of the time, but when it isn’t, it’s usually a stream or a series of hills. Eventually we entered Saskatchewan, and we found a town called Yorkton, which had a gigantic sign outside of it with all of the signs for its stores (right). As soon as we saw Wal-Mart in the distance, we were ready to jump out whether the car was stopped or not.

At Yorkton’s travel/tourist info center, there was an interesting farm machine and a monument, I was primarily interested in the farm machine…

We went into Wal-Mart and did some shopping, only to discover that the people of Yorkton were very zombie-like, gave strange blank looks and moved at an awkward pace. After exiting the giant store, we crossed the parking lot to Quizno’s Subs, finally another familiar food stop for me. Inside the restaurant we had a nice sandwich… and saw a strange goth guy with chains, piercings, and colored hair. An old man who walked in saw him and said to us, “Look at that kid, aye?” We just stayed quiet, giving each other amused looks, as he shook his head. It started hailing really hard, so we stayed inside for a while before leaving.

We continued on our way, I took a back seat again, and we set out sights for Saskatoon once again. It’s probably worthy to note the many variants of “Saskatoon” and “Saskatchewan” that had thus far been said.

• Saskapoo
• Saskatchatoon
• Saskaloo
• Saskatchewa
• Saskacoon

In addition to these, we had come up with many variants for “Garmin”…

• Gayman
• Gaymen
• Gaymon
• Garwin
• Garmish
• etc, etc

On our way to Saskatoon (or was that Saskamoon?) we spotted a little house for sale off the side of the road. We pulled into the driveway and a puppy came around the corner to greet us (right). The house was quite awesome in decoration, we could tell it was an older home, there were some old cars behind a fence and some old tools and rusty things about the yard—very picture-esque. And so I took some photos.

When we found out the seller wanted a quite insane amount of money for the house, we moved on to Saskatoon again (there were a lot of interruptions getting to Saskatoon). When we arrived, we were much less amazed than we thought we would be. We decided it was late enough to look for a place to stay, and that’s when the night’s troubles started. It turns out there was a convention in town and all of the hotels were booked… great news for us. We ate at A&W where the people there helped us try to locate a hotel for the night, unsuccessfully. We had a greasy meal and then got on the road again, towards a town called North Battleford…

Several bitchy hours of driving and phone calls later, we arrived in North Battleford, aka Brattlebord, Battlebird, Braddlebird, etc. While on the road we had contacted several hotels to see where we should stay the night. One of these was the Happy Inn, which sounded nice over the phone, but when we got there, it turned out to be a steaming pile of poo. When Julie asked to see a room, the guy took her license. We accidentally walked into a bar area instead of the room; we walked up a rusty metal staircase; another guy came out of the door next to us and said “woah, busy night” and continues to open a bottle of beer. The room was horrifying, and it only had one bed—the guy gave us the wrong room to look at. When Julie went back to return the key, the guy looked sad that his room had been denied; he said when Julie asked to see a room that “people don’t usually ask to see the room,” which is a bad sign in itself.

We ran as fast as we could from Not-So-Happy Inn, and found a Super 8 pretty much across the street, it was better than Happy Inn, but we wanted to check out the Best Canadian Inn across the other street, so we did… that also turned out to be horrible, with a bad smell. We finally got into the room at Super 8 around 3 in the morning, and had a good night’s sleep.

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