Why not Minot?!

Morning in Saskatoon was gray and a broad band of rain showers was heading directly toward the city, so we pulled up stakes and headed south. The weather forecasts for Regina and Winnipeg were not very encouraging, and with the weather moving to the northeast, south looked to be our best choice. My original plan had been to head to Minot, ND rather than Winnipeg because North Dakota was one of only two states I have never visited (Alaska is the other), but Winnipeg is a big enough city that I could have the bike worked on there if necessary. Since the bike has been fine and the tires are good, Minot was back on the itinerary.

The countryside here is wide open so you can see rain showers coming from some distance off. You don't always have a choice of roads to take to avoid them, but we arrived at Moose Jaw just after noon as a large thunderstorm passed through and headed for Regina, our next destination. We stopped for lunch and to let the storm pass, and then opted to head due south from Moose Jaw on SA36. We then took SA13 to Weyburn, which proved a roundabout way that added at least an hour to our trip, but at least kept us dry. We stopped to stretch at this intersection and I snapped the two pictures below -- one looking back north the way we came at storm clouds, and the second looking east in the direction we turned. One picture that I'm sorry we missed was of a group of trophy-size bull elk that were grazing in fenced pastureland out in the middle of nowhere. I presume it was a game ranch, but didn't see any signs calling attention to the place.



From Weyburn it was another 90 minutes or so through Estevan (the "Energy City" of Saskatchewan -- so named for the oil, gas and coal in the area) to the US border. I'm not sure why my mind's eye always pictures North Dakota as brown and beige -- maybe it's all those images of combines harvesting ripe wheat in the fall -- but certainly at this time of the year the landscape is nothing but green so that even foxtail grass waving in the wind looks beautiful. And despite that unrelenting wind, the skies (and ponds) is full of birds -- Red-winged blackbirds, bobolinks, meadow larks, woodcock, gulls, falcons, doves, even a lone pelican. It's obvious that the pothole lakes that dot the countryside still provide quality habitat for enormous populations of birds. There are also a lot of predators. Gi saw her first wild coyote along the roadside, and I saw several badgers as well as their favorite food -- prairie dogs.

The extra ride time made for a very long day and the wind didn't help. There are few trees in this region, and the road only occasionally drops into valleys below the horizon, so there's little shelter from the wind. When the road ran east so it was to our back everything was fine, but a lot of legs today ran due south, and we were hammered by 25 mph gusty winds. Not much fun for the driver and even less so for the passenger. Gi deserves a merit badge for ridership today. That wind is enough to drive a person mad, so perhaps it's no wonder that the population in this area is in decline and farmsteads are being abandoned at an increasing rate. (Or at least they were before last year's economic shocks.)

We spent the night in a Fairfield Inn and I noticed one of the Google Streetview recording cars parked in the hotel lot. I guess they really have recorded just about every last street in America if they're now doing Minot, ND!


At this point we're ad libbing the route home. We've put the kabosh on any further layover days as I think we are both ready to be home. We have several equally attractive (or unattractive) routes home, so we'll probably play it by ear for the next couple of days. All I know at the moment is that our next stop will be Brookings, SD.