SASKATCHEWAN - Prairies and Small Towns

Coming in to Kenaston - from the csr.  The folks of Kenaston SK are very proud of  their grain elevators and sad that they are being replaced by concrete models.  You can buy posters of them.  In one town, the elevator has been moved to a museum - on a trailer with 83 wheels.  The Dauphin Museum book tells me this.

Kenaston 

Saskatchewan was all wide open spaces - rolling grain fields and big skies.  We deliberately kept off the beaten track and avoided the large commercial centres.

The main street of Springside.  Springside Fine Foods was everything - petrol station, coffee shop, grocery store and washrooms.  They looked after us well and gave us free souvenirs when we left.

The towns we passed through were small, dominated by the grain elevators and tractor sales.  They gave a broad main street with few open shops and even fewer people.  I imagine that large farms which would once almost have been small villages, are increasingly mechanised and computerised, employing fewer and fewer people.  In one town the pharmacy also offered liquor outlet and newsagency services - and the local "restaurant" if there is one looks pretty run down.  Their saving grace may be that, since there seem to be no public toilets anywhere in Canada, passersby have to buy coffee to use their facilities.  Most have a small museum with a homemade sign and not enough volunteers.

The post office lady in the Nokomis Museum gave me quite a scare!!

If this sounds critical it isn't.  For my part we seemed to pass through Saskatchewan all too quickly.  The part of me that recognises mid western NSW as home, absolutely loved it.  In all that wide open space I feel I can breath deeply - and absolutely everywhere we have gone, we have been greeted with warmth and kindness.

By the by - we are generally finding accommodation a lot more expensive than expected, although it seems to be settling down to something more reasonable as we reach Ontario ... but even here, as tonight, we have hit a town where everthing is booked out and prices are at a premium again.  AND we have added an otter, scootling across the road on short legs, to our animal sightings.