Air Canada 1940

Our Ireland trip started with a drive to Vancouver, where we parked in our friends' driveway in Ladner and took a cab to the airport. We were flying Air Canada Rouge,  AC's "leisure airline." Apparently, leisure means "cheap." Despite some initial concerns after reading the reviews, I was able to fit into the seat without having to remove my kneecaps first. I think they fed us, though it must not have been anything memorable.

The flight left at 3PM and arrived in Dublin a little less than 9 hours later, at 8:30AM, just as we were finally getting ready to go to sleep.

Cloud cover and nighttime made it difficult to make out what we were flying over - although I did make out the dusky western shore of Hudson Bay and the mouth of the Nelson River. And maybe southern Greenland a few hours later, but by then it was awfully dark. The bottom photo was taken somewhere over Saskatchewan.

I write this back in Seattle more than three weeks later. With any luck, our trip will play out here in 20-30 posts over the next couple of weeks. As usual, the somewhat parallel beach collection will show up on Gravel Beach.

Cypress Hills

Today's itinerary offered a direct route from Lethbridge to Regina.  But my route (and therefore the family's route) took in a loop south from Medicine Hat so we could explore the Cypress Hills.  It was the end of a long weekend and there was a steady stream of RVs heading back to Calgary and the other prairie towns as we drove in.

The prairies are powerful places for me - thanks, I suppose, to long family driving trips as a kid and a fair amount of time spent living in oil towns in these wide open grasslands that fan east from the Rockies. As much as I love the Rockies, it was reaching the prairie east of Crows Nest Pass yesterday afternoon that moved me the most.  Endless rolling late season wheat fields back lit by the low sun helped, too.

The Cypress Hills are a small remnant of an earlier higher prairie - one long since removed elsewhere by meandering rivers flowing east.  Its height left it perched above the glaciers, so the partially forested surface is an extremely old one in this part of the world where most landscapes are young (if 12,000 years is young).  One of these photos shows how flat the upper surface remains - the very fact that it is higher than its surroundings means that there are few streams to erode it, except at its margins (and there, only slowly).

I find these little bits of high country surrounded by prairie enchanting.  Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. The Turtle Mountains on the North Dakota-Canada border.  The Rockies are full of small mountain ranges surrounded by high sage steppe, but these are lower, more remote from the mountains, and much more subtle.

These were important places for First Nations peoples.  They harbored game, provided water and refuge, offered timber for shelter and firewood.  They were strategic landmarks.  They were often the sites of skirmishes as settlers moved into the region.  They have also shaped western literature and sensibilities.  Wallace Stegner lived south of here and wrote Wolf Willow about that time.

Saskatoon

How can you not like a place called Saskatoon?  We spent much of the day driving across the wheat fields of Manitoba and Saskatchewan - this is the middle of harvest season and the combines were busy - and arrived late in the afternoon in this small (not that small - 200,000 people) city on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River.  We had found a place downtown, which made exploring the riverfront easy.

Saskatoon is called the City of Bridges.  I'm sure there are many other cities equally, or more, deserving of that title, but it certainly makes sense.  I drove to the east (south) side of the river to watch the sunrise on downtown - and found good coffee at a roasters on the south end of the Broadway Bridge.

I think many of our ideas for this Canadian trip came from some notes I'd made from Lonely Planet back in Seattle.  We had dinner at Souleio, which was great.  And then stopped for breakfast at the Park Cafe on the way out of town the next morning.