This morning we got up with beautiful sunshine. It was a nice 13 deg. C, warm enough for just a t-shirt and shorts (at least for me). Today is Annie's birthday and I didn't forget (Annie did though). We stayed overnight in Kenora. This is the jewel of the North in our books. It is situated on Lake of the Woods and is just so picturesque. We set off again in our trusty Honda and hit Hwy 17 right away. We made good time and crossed over into Manitoba. When we crossed, the highway turned into Highway 1 and became a 4-lane road. We will have 4 lanes all the way to Lethbridge, AB, whoo hoo what a luxury. Pretty soon after we crossed into Manitoba, about 50 km before Winnipeg, we hit the prairies and the landscape became less interesting. For those of you who have never been in Manitoba or Saskatchewan, the prairies are sort of like traveling from London to Windsor. Now the trip from London to Windsor probably takes about 2 hours, while travelling by car through the prairies will take us a good 2 days. The landscape is pretty flat with trees here and there. Sometimes the landscape is undulating (nice big word eh?) somewhat but more often than not it is as flat as a pancake. Right now, nothing flowers here yet but in some places we can see the wheat starting to peak above the ground.
Shortly after crossing into Manitoba, the sun started to disappear and the temperature started to drop. Near Winnipeg it started to rain. For the rest of the day we had rain off and on, mostly on, and the temperature continued to drop to 7 deg. C. I understand that back home you guys are still into a heat wave. We wish we had some of that here. It doesn't look like we're going to warm up here for the next few days either.
Just to back-track a bit, yesterday we crossed the continental divide. That means that the rivers now all flow north toward Hudson Bay or the Arctic Ocean. Just a little trivia for those of you that are trivia nuts like me.
In spite, or maybe because, of the cold wet weather we made good time and crossed into Saskatchewan shortly after lunch. We made it to Regina and started looking for a hotel/motel. We finally found a reasonably priced motel but although we plunked our $90.00 down, we're not too impressed with it. It's pretty basic for the price but at least it has a wireless Internet connection. Even budget chain hotels want $115 - $130 per night here which we find a real rip-off. The same hotels a couple of hundred miles south of us (in the US) charge half that price.
Well enough bitching, we went to a nice restaurant to celebrated Annie's birthday and really enjoyed our meals there. We didn't stop anywhere today for any special attraction, mainly because there weren't any. So, I have nothing more interesting to report. Tomorrow will likely be more or less a repeat of today I expect (minus the nice Kenora scenery).
We tried to Skype with Caroline and the grandkids tonight, but we have a very slow bad connection so it didn't work too well. We'll have to try some other time again.
To all a good night and I'll catch you tomorrow again via my blog.
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