The Longest Travel Day

Day six was going to be our longest day travelling. We were starting just north of Regina and wanted to get just to the north of Edmonton before stopping for the night.

When crossing the prairies the towns were few and far between. You always knew you were approaching a town when you saw a big grain elevator in the distance. Then you would see billboards starting at about 2 kms before getting to the actual town. This was true in North Dakota as well as in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

As we traveled through western Saskatchewan we noticed a strange cloud formation. It looks like the top of a tornado, but these clouds were not moving and the weather was fair. I handed the camera to rick and he took a picture of it. The other thing of note about Saskatchewan is that I have never seen so many hay bales in my life! it was clearly harvest season and we saw huge threshers cutting down the wheat crop. There were more gas wells dotting the fields and the roads were not quite as straight. We still looked out for the grain elevators to tell us when we were approaching a town. I did see my first real wild life in the form of a Silver Fox running along the Trans Canada Highway. I reacted too late to snap a picture, though.

When we entered Alberta there was a noticeable change in the terrain. I started to get hilly and curvy. Some of the hills were very big and we started to gain speed going down the hills to get a jump on climbing back out of them. There was one hill, though that had an unmarked bump just as we were finishing the decline. Rick hit the brakes but we did not slow down enough to hit the bump gently. I am pretty sure our car being towed behind us grunted! With the big hills the highway was expanded to include a 3rd lane. Now there was a fast lane, a slow lane and what I called the slow poke lane. We spent a lot of time in the slow poke lane. :-)

The weather was nice but as we moved further into Alberta we could see rain off in the distance. We did get sprinkled on a little but mostly the highway twisted away from it.

We stopped for gas in Vegreville, home of the largest Faberge egg. I managed to get a picture that framed both the town name and the egg.

One of the things I noticed out here is they paint things to make something dull interesting, like this silo in North Battleford Saskatchewan (I think).

 I also snapped this road sign that gave a name to the Lake we were passing.

 I caught this deer statue somewhere in Wisconsin. There were many of these little statues in that state, but I missed most of them, seeing them just a bit too late to take the pic.