Days 1, 2, 3

So it is day 4. Say what? I wanted to write every night, but it turned out that I would get to the hotel and pass out every afternoon. So today I’ll cap off what’s happened so far. Kate and I are currently in Regina Saskatchewan.

First of all, sorry to all my friends and family in Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois who we blew right past. There simply hasn’t been time to stop.

Day 1: Dover, New Hampshire to Elyria, Ohio
I think this day was totally uneventful. We saw a lot of New York, a lot of big vineyards, Lake Erie, and Cleveland. There was a fawn unattended on the side of the highway and a few hawks making kills next to the road. Ohio still looks like Ohio, except there are even more stupid subdivisions being built.

Day 2: Elyria, Ohio to St. Cloud, Minnesota
We saw a lot of farms. Then we went right through Chicago. I took I-94 because Kate hadn’t seen the city and driving in there were no cars or traffic so I said “sure”. Then funny enough, there was no traffic. We got a little stuck once for a broken down vehicle, and traffic was a little slow coming out of the city.

Then, we saw more farms. Wisconsin was still pretty. Kate did not let me stop at casinos. The weather was about 95 degrees which was unpleasant. MN was beautiful as always. We had a Tornado warning in St. Cloud and had to take Otis into the bathroom which he was not happy about.

Day 3: St. Cloud, Minnesota to Regina Saskatchewan
Gorgeous morning weather. Cool breeze and big clouds with lightning to the west. I love open skies! We get on the road, drive through something that looked like it could have been apocalyptic if we had left an hour later seen from the hotel to the right.

After a while we saw a moose walking through an alfalfa field. We reached Fargo, North Dakota pretty quickly and holy sunflowers all over. There were hundreds of sunflower fields. We finally got off the highway and on to route 52 after about an hour and moved north and west.

We passed through some serious tornado damage to a farm north of the Des Lacs National Wildlife Refuge. It looked pretty bad, a giant combine was completely flattened, trucks overturned and flattened and homes/barns destroyed.

Then we crossed the border into Saskatchewan. Right over the border was oil fields, coal fields, and oil/tar sand operations. These are disgusting. Anyone that thinks that tar sands are a viable way to get oil needs to visit Estevan, SK. This is nothing short of rape of the land. And they don’t just sit in one place and dig. They just expand and destroys everything they dig. There are sand dunes, still covered in oil and chemicals left to drain into the local soil. This was once great farmland, now it will never be anything again. All for a few kilowatt-hours per acre. Sacrificing an acre of land (forever) for a few hours worth of power should not be any real way of obtaining that power.

After all the energy crap, the rest of Saskatchewan (so far) is fairly pretty farmland. Flat though. Wow, it is flat. More of this to come today though. And at some point we need to get the oil changed. So, I’m off to get ready.