Day 5

July 24. I'm actually posting this on Day 6, since I had trouble with the hotel's Internet connection last night.

But Day 5 was amazing! From Saskatoon to Whitecourt, Alberta (447 miles). Alberta is a beautiful--rolling farmland with miles on miles of canola fields. I tried to capture the scene (see below), but it's a bit washed out. What you can't show in a picture is the smell of the canola and the miles of wildflowers. It filled the air, so the ride was not only scenic, but fragrant, a long, long way from the sensory attack that is the Ohio Turnpike!



I finally found out why it's so hard to get rooms up here. It's not the tourists, it's the work crews. The clerk at last night's hotel clued me in to that and sure enough, when I left this morning, every hotel in town had contractors' trucks and all kinds if heavy equipment parked outside.

So about that scarcity of rooms. This was supposed to be a "budget" hotel, but they only had two rooms left, one with bunk beds and the other with a jacuzzi, same price. Hmmm, let me think about that for a while, I said. OK, the jacuzzi. Here's what 99 bucks gets you in Whitecourt: