Tin Can Travels

18th – 29th August 2019

Our last stretch along the Yellow Head Highway brought us from our carpark in Lloydminster into Alberta proper and on to Edmonton, Alberta’s capital city. About a million people live here, compared to its largest city, Calgary, which is home to about 1.5 million. Edmonton itself is not on the usual Canada tourist trail but it had a couple of drawcards for us. Firstly, and peripherally, it is home to North America’s largest shopping mall. This was the biggest in the world when it was built, if you include the attached waterpark and indoor amusement park. Of course China has now built something bigger. Secondly, our visit coincided with the Edmonton Fringe Festival, second largest in the world after Edinburgh. We had found a space in one of our favourite types of park, a city park with easy public transport links to Downtown. The small park is in a small leafy valley and is home to a small ski field in the winter and a bazillion mosquitos in the summer. This, coupled with the close quarters of our fellow campers, meant that we didn’t do much sitting around outside in the evenings. We had four full days here. The first day we decided to visit the famous West Edmonton Mall, which was an easy 6km, single bus ride away. It was, as advertised, enormous. We came; we saw the ice rink, the water park, the sea lion enclosure, the amusement park, the firing range, the cinema, the pirate ship, the hundreds of shops and the three food courts; we conquered a coffee, a lunch and a round of mini-golf (victory to me). We bought nothing. Nothing. I have a master-shopper sister-in-law who will be ashamed of my behaviour. (You know who you are.) Then we got the bus home again. Busy day.

The next three days were spent fringeing. Or is it fringing. I am sure it is not a verb, but it is descriptive as far as made up words are concerned. The Fringe Festival was based in a district called Old Strathcona which is across the river from the CBD. It is a cool, hip, leafy place full of independent businesses and is home to the theatre district. It was a slightly more involved two bus, 10km journey to get there, but navigation was facilitated by a very logical numbered grid street system and some helpful locals on the bus. On the first day we successfully arrived in the right place and scoped out our surroundings. There was a great central hub in a small park with a box-office, beer tent, food trucks, busking areas and there were people and port-a-loos everywhere. The sun was shining and we set about the task of working out what on earth was going on, and what, when and where we would like to see. Our booking methods were fairly haphazard but mainly involved the comedy end of the vast spectrum rather than ‘cutting-edge-one woman- modern-dance-and-poetry-performance’ end.

Day 1 :

We saw a slick five person group doing a very funny sketch show. This theatre had a cool bar with a sun drenched patio. Winner.

Next was a stand up show by a very unusually liberal Kentucky born and bred comedian called Stephen Huff. The show was called ‘Darwin vs Rednecks’ and was very amusing. The venue was a small intimate lecture theatre in the Francophone University campus that was about 2 km from the main hub. There was a shuttle bus, but as it was nice day we decided to walk, underestimating the time needed and the heat, arriving just in time for the start. The fringe has a strict policy of no late-commers, which is great if you are the usually rabidly punctual people that arrive well ahead of schedule and infinitely annoyed by less organised people, rather than the people that dashed into their seats in a sweaty mess remembering why they are usually rabidly punctual. Anyway, he was very very funny, the show was more of an intimate tutorial than a gig and well worth the hustle.

After catching the shuttle back to the hub we visited the beer tent and then had a lovely meal at a restaurant across the road. Our seats were in the window which gave ample opportunity to soak up the weird, the wonderful and the frankly plain normal of the passing Fringe-goers. We opted out of public transport to get home and opted into an Uber.

Day 2 :

A near carbon-copy of the first part of the day to get us to the hub at nearly exactly the same time, about 1pm.

Our first show was another sketch show in the same theatre with the cool bar. Bar still cool, performances, writing and comedy not quite as slick or funny as the first lot.

Show two was a one-man scripted monologue of three interwoven stories delivered over a 90 minute period almost without break or pause. He was very good, funny and talented. The venue was a church, so the posteriors were a little worse for wear after an hour and a half sittingin a pew, and about the only time he left his script was to be amused/shocked by his own utterances of the ‘F’ word in such an ecclesiastical location.

Our last show for the day was back at the Francophone University Campus, and we took the bus. Canada’s Frenchness ebbs as you travel in a westerly direction across the country, but every now and then you find a small oasis of it in unexpected places. We deliberately arrived in more much more characteristic time for our show to give us time for a bite to eat at the small cafe here. There was loads of patio seating, live music and it was another lovely sunny afternoon/evening. I ordered a croissant Croque Monsieur, poutine and two beers in French whilst we listened to jazz before we headed into our show, musing on how little distance and time had passed since we were watching chuckwagon racing and dancing badly to country music only four nights ago. This is the same country, right?? The evening’s show was a cast of three- two men and a woman- who delivered a very slick Sherlock Holmes tale, rotating freely through the roles with only different voices and the passing around of a deer stalker hat to indicate who was playing who at any given time. Clever, talented and far too high brow for us really.

Day 3 :

Originally I had thought that we would explore town on our bikes today, but we were having to much fringey fun, so we got back on the bus for a third time and did it all again.

Our first show was a crazy, bonkers one-woman clown show delivering some off-the-wall sex education and pearls of wisdom in true Fringe Festival style. She was hilarious and very endearing, and I wonder if glittery blue eyebrows and lipstick could be a new look for me? We all learned some stuff in that hour…..

Next we saw a very good improv group do a very amusing show. This stuff can be tedious and embarrassing if not done well, but this came highly recommended and did not disappoint. I have huge admiration for this sort of comedy, but it has to be good.

Our last show of the day was another bonkers offering called ‘Thundercats’. This was a musical delivery of the 1980s/1990s Thundercats cartoon characters in the style of Cats, the musical. There was faceprint, big wigs, leotards and plenty of singing. Not our thing, per se, but it was big and bold, funny and polished, and we really enjoyed it. They sold beer in the foyer too, which helped.

In between these shows, we watched lots of buskers, sampled offerings from numerous food trucks and had a beer or several. A jolly good time was had by both and as we headed on our way the next day we thought that we might quite miss Edmonton, although we had only seen a teeny slice of it really.

Next on the journey was an intriguingly named place called Drumheller. This was a little off our natural westerly route, but sounded worth a detour. It sits south of Edmonton, closer to Calgary, and is a town located down in a valley created by the Red Deer River, a scar in the otherwise endless plains. The erosion of the rocks has created a Badlands of striped rocks and hoodoos. It is also an area high in dinosaur fossils and there is a fantastic palaeontology museum here. It is also the home to the world’s largest dinosaur… You can climb up into his mouth, but that sounds like crazy behaviour.

The town is named after a chap called Drumheller, which was less interesting than I imagined and aside from every business and street corner having its own dinosaur-themed model, sculpture, sign or mural, is unremarkable. It is here because they found coal here, and for a time was a bustling, rich and filthy place. Now it has the dinosaurs to lure us tourists in to feed the coffers and it is an occasional film location. There were a few scenes of the new Ghostbusters movie filmed here during our stay, although we missed it. The town is also home to an amphitheatre set in the badlands just outside town. It was built specifically as a venue for an annual Passion play that is put on here, but more recently also been used as a music venue.

There was a ‘famous-in-Canada’ band doing a gig the day after we arrived, and we decided to go along. Rain was forecast, but we were prepared with coats, a poncho for Nick and a natty oversized bin-bag with arm and head holes for me. The support band were great and the rain held off until they finished their set, and then the heavens opened. Unfortunately the accompanying electrical storm made the organisers anxious and we were all evacuated to the enormous beer tent for a hour. Shame! I hear you cry…Yes it was a shame, because the number of evacuees exceed the liquor licence restrictions, so the bar closed. Duh! The weather eased, we were released back into the open, and with much pomp and pizzazz the main act – Walk Off The Earth – took to the stage….. which suddenly went completely silent. We were prepared for rain, but some hapless sound engineer had allowed their sound console board to get drenched in the downpour, and it was drowned. They tried to fix it, but in the end their show was reduced to a few acoustic numbers performed by the six member band through a single microphone. Valiant, but it was not cutting the mustard in a 3000 seat outdoor venue. They called it a day and we all went home.

We did most of the jolly things one can do whilst we were here: a tour around a historic coal mine, a walk over a historic suspension bridge, a meal in a historic saloon, a scenic drive around the badlands and hoodoos (all old, so technically historic) including a river crossing on a historic ferry (been here for ages) and a trip to the fantastic Royal Tyrell Palaeontology Museum (full of dinosaur fossils which I suppose are pre-historic).

We had our historic 19th wedding anniversary here, and celebrated with an enormous plate of fried food for lunch and a walk amongst the Badlands that involved some off-piste scrambling up a seemingly sheer rock face to get back to the car. The Canadians seem to be very relaxed about marking trails, or not, as the case may be. I think their attitude is more: ‘Well, there is some good hiking over there. Go for it.’

Drumheller saw our last days in the prairies. We left town after five nights here, doing a bit of a backtrack to get back onto our westerly route and finally headed towards the Rockies.

On our way we had a one night stay in a park just outside a town called Rocky Mountain House. A whole town of thousands of people is named after a single, historic (obviously) fur trading shop. Quirky. Finally as we moved on the next day we had our first glimpse of ‘ the big pile of rocks’ and suddenly our journey was feeling a bit more like the Canada of postcards.

4th – 18th August 2019

Soon after leaving Riding Mountain National Park, our long, straight, flat, prairie flanked road brought us to our third Canadian province, Saskatchewan. Before we crossed the border we took a 40km detour to visit a National Historic Site of Canada. What lured us from the path, I hear you ask? The Inglis Grain Elevators! What?

Quick recap of what I learnt… The grain gets harvested, brought in trucks to the grain buyer at the elevator. He weighs it and pays the farmer. It gets tipped into a storage area through a grate, under the truck. A system of cups on a vertical belt is run by a lazy diesel engine and scoops the grain up carrying it to the top of, and depositing it into, a tall storage bin. The grain then gets loaded into railway boxcars that are stacked up along the line next to the elevator, to be collected by a passing engine. There were thousands of elevators around the prairies in its pre-industrial ‘hay’ day, but modernisation saw most of them close and be taken down. Inglis has a rare collection of five original elevators in their original row. It was very low key and we had a personal guided tour by the docent as we were the only people visiting at the time. I learned some things about grain. 1. Canola and rapeseed plants are essentially the same. Rapeseed oil is used industrially and it was only with some genetic modification of rapeseed to remove a few toxic compounds, that canola oil fit for human consumption was created. 2. Flax plant flowers are periwinkle blue and create fields that look like water. It is a little early for us to see this unfortunately. 3. A bushel is equal to 8 dry gallons or 4 pecks.

Suitably educated, we continued into Saskatchewan. To be fair, this is fairly similar to Manitoba in size, topography, and industry. It is also about 2.5 times the size of NZ, but with even fewer inhabitants, barely 1 million in total. It is also pretty flat and mostly given over to the growing of wheat, barley, flax and canola, but has another important export in the form of potash, a potassium rich mineral mined in vast quantities and mostly converted into fertiliser. Saskatchewan is the world’s largest producer of potash. It is in the North American Central Time Zone, the same as Manitoba, but for some reason it does not observe daylight savings, so we rolled back an hour as we crossed the border. Another few days of disrupted appetites and sleep routines. We compensate by eating more, starting drinking earlier and spending a splendid amount of time asleep. We are definitely in the camping groove now.

Our first stop along the road through Saskatchewan was two nights in a small highway town called Foam Lake. Don’t let the name fool you. There was no lake here. Our camp was a small leafy and charming, quiet town-owned park set back about 500m from the main road. We had an enormous site, so big in fact that we managed to have a ‘marital discussion’ about where to actually park in it. We thrashed that out quickly and efficiently and were soon installed. Our ability to have a row about nothing, sulk for a bit, then carry on as if nothing happened has become elevated to ‘grand master’ level. Our trigger is usually hunger, but sometimes a full bladder can work just as effectively. We became a little anxious as the afternoon went on, and it became apparent that almost all the other campers in our area seemed to be all gathered for a family party, with more cars and trucks pulling up as the afternoon became evening. There was a massive table, several BBQs, lots of coolers and even a small bouncy castle for the kids. We braced ourselves for a noisy evening running into the night. Happily for us, it turned out to be the tamest party of the century, fizzling out before darkness fell. I sometimes forget that this is Canada, not America. Volumes are lower. Earplugs were not needed.

The next day we decided to head into the town centre on our bikes to see what was going on. This was only about 1.5km away, and the answer was NOTHING. We knew that it was a public holiday Monday (just to commemorate having jolly long summer weekend, as far as I could tell) but we were expecting something to be happening/open. Nope. Zip. It was a ghost town with out the tumbleweed. Deserted. No humans to be seen. Not one of the 1148 people that allegedly live here. Odd. They must have been all down at that imaginary lake…. Luckily we had provisions for the duration, so we went home for a cup of tea and a biscuit. The rest of the afternoon was spent sat outside the camp office, 500m from Tin Can, the only place that we could access the Wifi. It’s not all rainbows and puppies here, you know, but the homemade bacon double cheeseburgers that we cooked on the campfire that evening were pretty darn good, so it’s not all hardship.

In the morning we rolled onward to some veritable civilisation, the city of Saskatoon. Dubbed the Paris Of The Prairies it is the biggest conurbation in Saskatchewan with about 300,000 inhabitants and was named for the native Saskatoon berry. On our way there we took a moderate detour to visit the curiosity of Little Manitou Lake. This is a smallish lake about 100 km from Saskatoon which has a very high mineral content, the same ones that produce the potash, causing it to be ten times denser than normal freshwater and causing hyper-buoyancy. It is one of only three bodies of water in the world with this property: the well known Dead Sea and the lesser known Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. We couldn’t not go. There is a little spa resort and a beach on the lakeshore and we parked up to go for a ‘float’.

Unfortunately it was a bit chilly, so it was a very brief event. We came, we floated, we took the obligatory photographs and then we scampered back onto dry land. Luckily we had the sanctuary of TC to change in and get warm again, and after some sandwiches we continued on to our destination.

In Saskatoon we had five nights booked in another town park only 3 km from downtown, with a good riverside cycle trail to get us there easily. Our site backed on to a golf course so it was generally quite quiet with only occasional thwacking, swearing and celebratory noises to break the peace. There was a huge 50ft tall protective fence between the course and the park which made the discovery of a golf ball in our site most intriguing. Some trick shot! Our time here coincided with the Saskatoon Exhibition, a week-long city fair held at the exhibition grounds on the other side of the river from our camp.

This was a fiesta of funfair rides, food trucks, performers, art exhibitions, music and fireworks. We were going! Getting there involved about 8km of cycling up river, across river and down river which was very pleasant and earned some much needed calorie credits for the dubious food choices that we made later in the day. We arrived mid afternoon, the only cyclists to pull up in the 1000+ capacity car park. Our first entertainment was watching a bloke doing an ice hockey themed flaming hockey stick juggling act. Can’t get much more Canadian than that, unless he had doused himself in maple syrup, I suppose.

The second act was a police themed high diving act. Bizarre and impressive. The third was a very lame trial bike demonstration which was generally quite boring, except for the dog that belonged to one of the riders and ran around generally getting in the way and causing mayhem. There was a half decent band playing in the beer tent area whilst we were there, the male lead singer doing a fine selection of high octave female artist covers. As for food, we had our first taste of perogies. These are an Eastern European import and are a boiled dumpling filled with various fillings such as cabbage, mashed potato, meat or cheese. Perfect street food! And of course poutine. The fine, fine, fine, dish of chips, gravy and cheese curd. Who thought chips and gravy could be improved on? The Canadians, that’s who! Our nutritional extravaganza had its finale with a bag of mini donuts. I only wanted a few, but the smallest bag that we could buy contained 20. Shame. Needless to say we both ate 10 donuts each, although possibly I had 12 and Nick had 8. There was a high degree of self loathing in the 10 minutes following their consumption, but we moved on quickly to the beer tent to help ourselves forget… The funfair didn’t lure us in its quest to spend any money to spin ourselves around or upside down, or to try and hit things with things in order to win things, but it provided ample people watching opportunities. Replete and tired we cycled home at about 7.30 pm, opting not to stay for the evening concert which we could hear from our campsite anyway, and each evening of the exhibition there was an 11pm fireworks display t0 keep us from any early nights.

The city of Saskatoon itself is a little treasure. It sits either side of the South Saskatchewan River with cycle trails up and down both sides. It has several French inspired buildings, lots of green space and tree-lined avenues. The city centre is busy as the main shopping mall is located right in the middle of town and it has a very stylish new modern art museum. We spent a day mooching around, drinking coffee, browsing through the mall, eating lunch and then filled the afternoon with seeing the new Tarantino movie, which was excellent. On another day we visited the art museum, spending most of our time being amused by all the bizarre creations that pass as art, and particularly all the hot air written about it. I call it Art Depreciation.

The other jolly thing that we did in Saskatoon was go to a basketball game. The elite professional league is in its inaugural season in Canada, and we got tickets to see the Saskatchewan Rattlers take on the Edmonton Stingers. Having never seen a live basketball game before, this was on our list of quintessential North American things-to-do. We tracked down the shuttle bus stop in town to get transport out to the venue, which was on the edge of the city. (Elton John is playing here in October) and arrived in time to get beer, burgers and find our seats which were one row back from courtside at the home end. It was a high energy evening with a DJ playing tunes all through play, cheerleaders, mascots, commentators, TV cameras and general merriment. Sat behind us was a group of very vocal blokes in their early 20s who obviously knew a lot about basketball, and also knew some of the players of the home team. They spent the whole time yelling, cheering, calling play and getting the attention of their friends on the bench. They were very amusing and made the evening for us.

The tense game culminated in a winning shot by the Rattlers made in the last 10s of the game with the visitors missing a basket in last 2s. What excitement! The crowd went wild, and one of the sweaty 6 foot 10 inch Rattlers players used his unfeasibly long legs to bound up past us over the chairs to celebrate with his crazy mates behind us. Quite a fantastic first basketball experience. We caught the bus back to town, and followed the buzzing crowd to a cool brew pub for a few drinks before getting an Uber home.

After Saskatoon we continued to follow the Yellowhead highway northwest to’ The Battlefords’. This is the collective term for the towns of Battleford and North Battleford which sit either side of the North Saskatchewan River. We stopped here for provisions and had a fun half hour in an enormous self service truck wash shed knocking some dirt and flies off Big D and TC.

Our camp for the next 3 nights was 40km north from here in Battleford Provincial Park, a small park on the shores of Jackfish Lake. We had hoped to do some kayaking or paddle-boarding but the temperature dropped and the wind picked up so watersports were suddenly less inviting. Instead we did some biking, hiking and loafing, had some campfires and cooked some more spectacular burgers. There was even a lakeside mini-golf course and on one memorable windy morning I took a glorious 5 shot victory from my husband. He is still hurting from this.

From Battleford we continued northwest along the Yellowhead Highway. The landscape changed subtly with the fields of the prairies sprouting gas and oil wells and the grain elevators being joined by scattered refineries. Not quite so scenic, but not as ugly as you might imagine. With gas and oil comes jobs and money, and we definitely noticed this as we pulled into our next stop, Lloydminster. The town is currently booming with lots of housing being built and many workers living in RVs and tons of shops and businesses. Lloydminster is Canada’s only province border town, with the Saskatchewan-Alberta border running through the middle of it, marked by four tall red steel obelisks. All the shopping is on the Alberta side as there is no sales tax on that side of the border, and the whole town observes mountain time, keeping thing simpler in the winter. We had booked into the town park which is on the Saskatchewan side but when we arrived our host had a confession to make. He had overbooked and there was no site for us. He had been relying on some of the oil workers to go home and free up some space but this hadn’t happened. He was very apologetic and had a solution. We could pull up next to the pavilion/bathroom block, plug into a normal power socket and could camp for free. He would move us to a site as soon as one became available. We could deal with that. We filled the water tank and parked up.

We weren’t the only ones in the overflow zone as two big motor bikes with small trailer tents arrived soon after us and set up camp on the nearby lawn. After getting sorted they headed off to dinner on their bikes, meeting a big group of fellow bikers at a restaurant about 1.5km down the road. Not quite sure why they didn’t walk. It would have taken less than 20 minutes and they could have had a few drinks and stretched their legs. Oh I know. One has to turn up on a bike to a gathering of bikers, even if you’ve ridden your bike 400km that day. They were packed up and gone by 8am, long before we surfaced. Probably had another bazillion kilometres to cover. Crazy muddy duckers.

The main attraction of our stay in the utilitarian town of Lloydminster was to attend an illustrious sporting event: the Canadian chuckwagon racing finals. A sport we had previously not even known existed so therefore was nowhere near our ‘to-do’ list. It was a series of races over five evenings at the exhibition grounds, 2km from our camp. The end of the series was to be celebrated on the final night with Roots & Boots, a ‘country music cowboy cabaret dance’ with performances by three well known country stars from the 1990s and a couple of sets by an up and coming local band. Despite our usual lack of enthusiasm for both live music generally and country music specifically we felt that this was something not to be missed and we had purchased our tickets a few weeks ago. Now all we needed was some cowboy gear. We saddled up the ponies (the wheeled kind) and headed to Alberta to do some shopping. Our destination? A western wear shop about 3km up the road. They would know what we needed. We were taken under the wing of a very helpful assistant called Yvonne who advised us on the subtleties of Canadian cowboy fashion and we left the store the proud owners of a pair of Wranglers and a new shirt each. We were ready! On the way home we swung our steeds up to the exhibition grounds to check the lay of the land and the safest route to cycle, especially considering it was going to be dark on our way home after the party. We discovered that there was basic on-site RV parking available at the grounds. How better to get home from a party by just walking across the carpark?? We could move up here for that last night and not have to cycle anywhere! We headed back to camp to find out that our host had a proper site available for us and it was still free for our inconvenience, so we quickly packed up and shifted and filled our afternoon with inactivity and a load of laundry. The next day was miserable with the temperature dropping to about 10 deg C and it was really windy too. Summer had been suspended. I got a bit of cabin fever so talked Nick into coming with me to the supermarket, a short 10 minute cycle away. Unfortunately we mis-timed our journey fantastically and got caught in a sudden downpour. I wasn’t very popular. Our planned attendance at the chuckwagon races that evening was cancelled as it was far too cold. We stayed in, put the heater on (!), wrapped up in rugs (!), ate curry and watched a movie instead. This is early August in the Northern Hemisphere, isn’t it? Nuts.

Saturday we packed up and headed to the exhibition grounds after lunch, finding a spot to park up and paying our $15 for the pleasure. We were 50m from the wagon racing entrance, 100m from the cabaret venue. We filled the afternoon with a visit to the town’s cultural centre/gallery/museum, a short cycle away. The highlight of this was a taxidermy display of over 1000 specimens all done by the same chap called Fuchs, apparently the largest collection of taxidermy done by one man in North America. From polar bears to humming birds, he had converted more living creatures into posed stuffed ones than you could shake a stick at. Here is a diorama of rabbits playing poker…

So. Chuckwagon racing. A sort of chariot racing for the modern times. We headed over to the track at about 5.30pm, bought some beers and had a ‘beginners guide’ tutorial from a nice lady behind the bar. Each race had four wagons. Each wagon is pulled by four thoroughbred horses and has one driver. The race starts with each wagon stationary at a starting barrel. Then an outrider, a single rider on a horse, gets off his horse, stands behind his team wagon and when the starter horn sounds, the outrider picks up a ‘stove’ (a very small barrel) and loads it into the back of the waggon, then the waggon races off, around a second barrel, back around the first barrel and then gallops off to do a single lap of the racetrack.

Meanwhile the outrider, jumps back on their horse and, with a second team outrider who seemed to magically appear from nowhere, gallops off to chase their wagon. There was a complicated system of penalties and despite watching 8 races, we still really had no idea what the outriders were doing, or how the ‘stove’ barrel thing was relevant. It was still a lot of fun though. It was sunny, but with a very cold wind and we were like icicles by the end of the races with 30 minutes to kill before the cabaret started. Luckily, home was in the carpark so we went back, put the heater on and had a cup of tea to warm up before slipping into our new threads.

The cabaret was held in an enormous shed with a massive stage and dance floor area covered in a mysterious fine grit. There were trestle tables and chairs to seat about 500-1000 people and two bars. About half the folk were in proper western wear and the other half obviously hadn’t seen the memo. We blended in perfectly as long as we kept our mouths shut. It was a blast. The first few hours we spent stood in a perfect spot for people watching and analysis whilst warming ourselves up to dancing with some drinks. It became apparent that 80% of all people that live in rural Canada learn to do a ‘country two-step’ at some point between birth and the end of high school. It was very impressive. All ages, all sizes, all combinations of couples hit the dance floor and instantly wheeled around doing this tight-stepped, foot-sliding dance move, making it suddenly obvious what the dance floor grit was for. It made the moves much easier than being on plain concrete. We, obviously, could not two-step, but by then could not care less and danced for a couple of hours until the batteries ran out just before the 2am finish.

Getting home was a breeze. Taking your whole home to a party really simplifies the process. We slept like the dead and surfaced very late the next morning feeling only mildly shabby. We headed back to our faithful road, the Yellowhead highway, leaving Saskatchewan and continued northwest into Alberta proper.

26th July – 4th Aug 2019

Manitoba is a fine place. Little did we know but Lonely Planet have even named it as one of its top ten regions to visit in 2019. How fortuitous! A province of lakes, forests and miles and miles of prairie farmland sliced through by some of the straightest roads we have travelled, even when compared to our North Dakota days. Manitoba is roughly twice the size of New Zealand, with a population of around 1.3 million, less than the population of Auckland. More than half of these people live in or around the only major city, Winnipeg. In fact over 80% of all Canadians live in urban areas, so in a country that is larger than the USA by land area, with only 10% of its population, once you get out into the countryside this place is emptier than the B&Q pedestal fan aisle during a UK heatwave. Really empty.

We rolled across into Manitoba from Ontario soon after leaving Kenora on the Lake of the Woods and stopped at an information centre just across the border to pick up a highway map. I am a much happier passenger/navigator with good old fashioned paper cartography to back up the sometimes blinkered google navigation of our ‘lady-in-the-phone’, Mary-Lou. She can be blind to the big picture of getting from A to B. I also enjoy the dark art of in-car fold out map origami. During our planning of this stage of our trip we decided to minimise our single night stops as far as possible, so our next destination was a two night stay in a small lakeside town called Lac du Bonnet. It was a cute little holiday town with a small town beach and all the basic amenities. Our camp was about 4km down the road and owned and run by a delightful couple in their mid seventies. It was pretty sizeable and immaculately kept with acres and acres of tidy lawns, flower beds and newly planted trees. They still do all the maintenance and upkeep entirely themselves and it was exhausting to watch them in constant motion as we loafed in our chairs in the sun. Not only did they manage the campground, but adjoining it was a small piece of woodland through which they had cut and gravelled a maze of tracks leading to a plethora of huts and sheds containing fantastical dioramas with mannequins, decorations in the trees and nursery rhyme signs. It was charming and bizarre in equal measures. At Halloween they have actors dressed up in the various locations and have a little golf-cart ladybird train which takes local children around the wood after dark. This too they do all by themselves. Some people have more get up and go than others.

It was an easy flat cycle to town and we arrived to find the weekly market in full flow. This was mostly arts and crafts, with the odd vegetable thrown in for good luck. No coffee cart, however. There should always be coffee available at these gigs. We did our usual trick of wandering around, not buying anything and then sloped off to find a cafe for a caffeine fix. We then killed the thirty minutes needed until it was justifiably lunch time by cycling around looking at homes, real estate agent window displays and tat shops and then parked up at the beach. Here there was a food truck and we had a very satisfactory lunch of: beetroot and chickpea salad and taco fixings served on an opened a bag of cheesy Doritos . No prizes for guessing whose was whose… The small beach was very sweet and clean, had a safe swimming area cordoned off with buoys and a squadron of pelicans but was populated by some noisy mini-humans. I think they are called children. They made our ears hurts and despite having brought our swimmers, it wasn’t hot enough to need a swim. We cruised home to the peace and quiet of camp and lazed around until drink o’clock. Later that evening we spent a few hours chatting with our neighbours around their campfire. They only live a few hours away in Winnipeg, but quite often come to this camp for the weekend to get away from the city and go fishing on the lake.

Our next top along our road was a place called Grand Beach Provincial Park, about 90 km north of Winnipeg. It sits on the east shore of Lake Winnipeg which I had never heard of before but which is apparently the world’s 11th largest body of freshwater. The area along the east of the lake had some pristine boreal forests and rivers and had recently been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our camp was in the woods with a maze of loop roads and paths. The sites were large and private and we were only a 5 minute cycle ride from a 3 km beautiful white sandy beach. This beach has a fairly constant presence on the ‘top ten beaches in North America’ list and we see why. Despite the number of campsites in our park at the East end of the beach and the number of seasonal cottages down the other end of the West end of the beach there is minimal commercialisation of the area. At the West beach there is a small boardwalk which has a couple of food vendors and one small beachwear kiosk, but that was about it. This is in fairy sharp contrast to the origins of this as a beach resort. In the early 1900s the railroad came to this area facilitating the building and visiting of a large privately owned resort hotel here which opened in 1917. Winnipegians flocked to the resort by train for day trips (the last train back to the city leaving at midnight) or longer stays and at one point it boasted the Commonwealth’s largest dancehall pavilion. Its success was only curtailed in the 1950s when a devastating fire destroyed the dancehall, a tragedy that the resort never really recovered from. At some point the resort closed and the land passed to the Provincial Park Service, who have maintained its low key magnificence ever since. We had two full days here. On the first we cycled around to the other end of the beach, about 5-6km via the road. It was a very windy day with a seemingly constant headwind in both directions. How is that possible? It was warm, but the lake was boasting some seriously impressive white horses and surf, so was closed for swimming, not that you’d think that as there was a not insignificant number of people splashing around in its murky shore break. It was generally fairly quiet though as the wind was leaving no nook nor cranny without high pressure sand ingress meaning sitting around on the beach was not for the fainthearted. The next day was much calmer. We walked a nearby loop track, keeping an eye and ear open for bears. (None). We had a few hours on the beach, swam, soaked up some rays and watched the boats tow people about on the flat water. It is at times like this that we really miss our boat. Should be waterskiing….

From Grand Beach we headed south again, skirted around the north of Winnipeg and headed west along a section of the Trans Canadian Highway into the ongoing prairie lands of southern Manitoba. We caught a glimpse of Winnipeg’s skyline from a distance, but were glad to be avoiding it. The land is very flat here. They say that if your dog slips its collar, you can see it running away for hours and hours. There are endless miles of arable land, planted in wheat and barley, corn and canola. The best business to be in seems to be the sales of massive bits of farm machinery to tame it all. This night was a single night stay in one of the few larger towns outside Winnipeg, Portage La Prairie. The park did have a pool, but was a ‘child noodle soup’ of noise and merriment that we decided against joining. We did laundry instead and then took a stroll around the rather lovely wooded park, admiring some of the set-ups of the seasonal campers. Large trailers were enhanced with decks, summer houses, elaborate fire pits, decorations and plant pots. The sky was filled with the booms of an approaching thunder storm and there was a weather watch in place for hail. The rain started just as we were sitting down outside to eat our dinner. We pulled the table under the awning but it gave no protection against the quickly monsoonal downpour, so we retreated inside. The thunder and lightening continued for hours and the rain was so loud on the roof that it was pointless to try and watch a DVD. Nothing to do except gaze up at it all happening through the skylight. In the morning our next door neighbour told us that hailstones the size of baseballs had fallen 50km to the north. Glad that missed us.

From Portage La Prairie we headed north, leaving the Trans Canadian Highway to join the Yellowhead Highway. This, and the Yellowhead Pass which is its route across the Rockies, is named for a French fur trapper and explorer Pierre Bostonais. He had blond streaks in his hair and was nicknamed ‘Tête Jaune’, or Yellowhead. It seems that there isn’t a lot in this part of the world that wasn’t discovered, founded or started by a French fur trapper. The road was very straight and continued to take us though flat prairie lands until we started to hit some subtle undulations in terrain. The prairies were finally giving way to some low-lying hills that led us to our next destination, Riding Mountain National Park. Now ‘mountain’ is a strong term for this area, but we did climb 500m and the views changed from crops to woods and lakes again. We had booked a site in a large campsite in the small holiday town of Wasagaming, on the shores of Clear Lake. Population 400 in the winter, up to 30,000 on peak summer holiday weekends, like this one.

The town and campsite both sit within the National Park boundary, so again, despite having a nice selection of eateries and shops, it was very pleasantly uncommercialised. Our site was massive and had a family of ground squirrels living nearby to keep us entertained. We were warned about the black bears but didn’t see any evidence of them. There was lots to do in and around town without needing to drive into the park wilderness. On one day we hired kayaks for a few hours and cruised up the lakeshore to the north, another day we cycled along a lakeside trail that went to the south. The cycle trip included a picnic lunch and a swim from a small quiet beach that was far from the madding crowd of the town beach. From all angles there was the constant amusement of the antics of the boaters. It was a large lake with plenty of space for all but there seemed a compulsion to be whizzing up and down the shore in close proximity to one another or all mooring up in the same bays, cheek by jowl. (Is it a pack mentality or a need to show off?) We drank in a bar called Canoe and ate in a restaurant called Wigwam. The sun shone and the good times keep a’rolling.

So we were now in Ontario,Canada. Up until now our travels have been centred around the central premise that we were exploring the USA and now we were, in the veritable blink of an eye, in another country altogether. When you call the island nations of either UK or NZ home, entering another country is not so easily achieved. It involves some moderate-major travel organisation, which at its very least is taking the train through the Chunnel to France, but for us usually involves the tediousness of air travel. We had arrived with only a few nights pre-booked and no real plan for the next eight weeks. This ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ approach to travel has worked splendidly for us before, but out of season. Here we were, in the middle of school holidays, in a country that has very short summers, competing for campsites with a nation that loves to camp, in a camper’s paradise. We would need to get organised fairly quickly.

We stopped in at tourist information to get some maps and then found our way to the first of our camping options for the night, neither of which were pre-bookable and both on a ‘first-come-first-served’ basis. This one was just outside Fort Frances, the town we had arrived into, in a riverside town park. The park was huge, but the RV parking was limited and at very close quarters. There was one space available, but it didn’t look very inviting. The whole place was dreary in the continuing rain and we weren’t feeling it, so we drove on. Our second option was about 30 km down the road in a small village called Chapple, which had advertised a tiny town RV park with only five sites.

We headed there, with fingers crossed. It was lovely. By the time we arrived the rain had stopped, the sun was shining, the park had only two sites taken, was right on the river in a park-like setting next to the village hall and we were feeling very glad that we had not settled with the first place. And, it was free!

As we were setting up we could see that there were tables and decorations for a big formal party being set up in the village hall. Possibly it was going to be a noisy evening. We figured that we could deal with some late night music but in the end, didn’t have to as the party was going to be the evening after. Things were just getting better and better. The river in question is the Rainy River that we had crossed earlier, so we spent our first night looking across it back at the USA.

At this stage, the only apparent differences between the two countries were: the different flags fluttering, the colour of the money, everything printed in french swell as canadian, the accents, the presence of the metric system, the high price of fuel and the widespread provision of recycling bins. So subtle.

Chapple boasted a museum, which was closed and a cafe that was open for breakfast and lunch. Having had a complimentary night’s accomodation courtesy of the town we though it only polite to spend some money in the cafe, so we had a very delicious and hearty fried brunch on the way out the next morning. It must have been good, there was even a local cop there, and a lady with a large bucket of strawberries. Random.

In the morning we drove north towards Kenora, a town on the north-east of Lake Of The Woods. This is a 4000 square mile lake, containing over 14,000 islands, that spans the border. Two years ago we stayed on the south-west of the lake in the Minnesotan town of Warroad. A fishing trip on to the lake can see you crossing the border on purpose, or by accident, so potentially passports are needed. Customs are pretty relaxed here though.

The town of about 15,000 sees its population double in the summer as lots of people from the nearby city of Winnipeg have holiday cottages here, or come to camp. The town’s original name of Rat Portage was changed in 1905 after the it amalgamated with two nearby settlements of Keewatin and Norman. The new name of Ke-No-Ra was also a diplomatic amalgamation, but I prefer the ratty moniker personally. It is a very pleasant place, seemingly enhanced by its tourism rather than overwhelmed and altered by it. We had booked five nights here in a municipal park on the on the outskirts of town, but it couldn’t accommodate us until Sunday evening, so we had a single night in another park about 15km down the road. This was mediocre. In the morning we were eating breakfast outside and one of our neighbours spotted our large jar of Marmite on the table (I might have bought this online a few weeks ago at great expense having failed to find it in any stores in the Mid-West)

“You two must be Brits!”, she yelled across the way in a northern British accent. Guilty, we admitted. After a few moments of chatting we had discovered that, although now a naturalised Canadian, she was from Warrington, less than 30 mins drive from where Nick grew up in Wigan, had spent many an evening in a pub called The Cherry Gardens, his old local and had been at Liverpool University at the same time that I was. That is the power of Marmite, Folks.

After our long and taxing twenty minute drive, we arrived in Kenora. Filled with fuel, (Crikey Moses, it is about twice the price here as it was in the States. Suddenly Big Dave’s 9 mpg is less amusing.) stocked up at the supermarket (ditto for price shock) and found camp. This was on the lakeshore, although we were in the cheap-seats without a view around the back and it was only 2-3 km from the town centre, an easy cycle. The camp had a little beach and a floating boardwalk which annexed off a safe swimming area, a big advantage in here where everyone is charging around at great speed in their motorboats. It was pleasantly warm, not too hot and humid and we were looking forward to not moving for a few days.

The town had a great waterfront boardwalk with a big open-sided permanent marquee. This plays host to a large weekly market which had mainly craft type stalls with a few vegetable and smoked meats thrown in for good luck. We wandered around, but have perfected the art of not buying anything. No space for clutter…The town also has a small museum which had an exhibition of First Nation ‘jingle dresses’. These are hand made by the native women, adorned with cones of metal (made historically out of the lids of metal chewing tobacco tins) that jingle as they perform traditional dances during pow-wows. The first ones were made around 1900, after the idea and design came to a tribal member in a vivid dream. The museum also had an exhibit dedicated to the town’s ice hockey team, the Kenora Thistles. This ‘all locals’ team holds the distinction of being the team from the smallest town ever to win the coveted holy grail of ice hockey, the Stanley Cup, which it did in 1907. We found a good lakeside spot for cocktails and seaplane watching. Nick got a haircut and bought some new pants (underwear not trousers, Americans). We swam in the lake, sat on the beach, had lots of BBQs. There were tame deer in the camp.

On the last day we cycled to a nearby hiking area, stopping at a big fish on the way.

In the trailhead carpark we met a local man who had just seen a black bear and her cubs on the trail. We vacillated for about ten minutes about whether to continue and decided to go ahead, with bear spray at the ready. There were plenty of people ahead of us who seemed unfazed, so we felt partially reassured. We didn’t see them, and no-one else we met had seen them. Only one big bear poop in the middle of the trail was evidence that they were there and that the chap in the carpark wasn’t pulling our leg. In the end our main mistake was taking our bikes as we ended up pushing them half the way around the mostly un-cycleable 5km trail. An unexpected upper body workout was the positive spin on the experience. There were very dark clouds looming and thunder booming as we cycled home at a fair lick, trying to escape getting wet. We didn’t make it, and got pretty soaked in the last 500m home stretch.

The other thing that we had to do whilst we were here was address the trip planning situation. We were battling the summer vacationers who had booked their campsites months and months ago, snaffling all the good spots. Nick put in some long hours on-line and managed to plan a route, cool places to stay and jolly stuff to do. An itinerary is now in place and we can relax and enjoy the ride, rather than have to boondock in lay-bys. We have a good mix of town and country stops, sublime and ridiculous activities and another seven weeks of Canadian fun.

15th – 19th July 2019

After a nondescript night in our post-Chicago ‘recovery park’ in Union, Illinois (90F, pool, laundry, early night) we began our dash to leave the country. I won’t bore you with the numbers, but due to our extended travels in the USA over the past three years we are in danger of becoming a ping on the radar of the American tax man. Something we can do without. So, to Canada we needed to go, and to give us enough days back in the USA at the end of the trip, we needed to be crossing the border on the 19th of July. By our leisurely travelling standards this involved a veritable picking up of skirts and getting a wiggle on. It was 750 miles to the border from Union and we had given ourselves four driving days to do it. We could easily have done it in two: I said a wiggle not a hustle.

The first of these days took us from Union to Portage, Wisconsin, America’s ‘dairy-land’ state. It produces a lot of milk, and some surprisingly good cheese as we discovered. One of these was based on a Finish cheese in the style of a halloumi. They called it ‘bread cheese’ and marketed as a cheese that, once cooked, could be used for dipping or as a base for some other tasty treat. Only in America… Our cheese of note was a sheep cheese. Does that count as dairy??

Our journey started with a cross country zigzag that seemed to defy the compass until we successfully met up with the interstate highway. We bashed up to our next camp which was at the top of a small ski field hill rather grandly titled Cascade Mountain. The camp was grassy with lots of trees and fairly empty. We had a choice of sites, all fairly uneven and sloped, but after 10 minutes of ‘discussion’, multiple repositionings and the implementation of several levelling blocks we were sorted. It was, surprise, surprise, hot again and we beetled off to the inviting looking pool. This seemed to have be unofficially declared the private domain of a large rowdy family who had settled in for the duration and annexed the whole place. We dunked in a corner at the deep end to cool off, but the shrieking and ‘let’s-make-this-into-a-wave-pool’ game chased us back to chez nous before long.

Day two of our northerly dash took us to a place called Chippewa Falls which is still in Wisconsin. It was the birthplace, in 1925, of Seymour Cray, the father of super computing. The town hosts the Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology and boasts an unparalleled collection of Cray Supercomputers, with at least one example of every model. Fantastic random tourist attraction for the nerdy traveller. It was closed whilst we were here. Chippewa Falls also, despite the name, was strangely devoid of any waterfalls to go and look at too. Never mind. We set up and I amused myself with the fun job of draining the tanks and doing a full wash out. Oh, the highs and lows of camping…

Day three and we were on our way to Duluth, Minnesota. We had factored in a two night stop here as we had had spent four days here in June 2017 on our way ‘across the top’ and had loved it. The RV park is in a marina, the summertime sites being the hard standing storage for the boats that are hauled out for the winter. A fantastic duel purposing of space. It also makes for great views and interesting comings and goings, if you like boats, that is. The town is right in the south-west corner of Lake Superior, and is one of the busiest inland ports in the world.

It has an amazing lift bridge that rises numerous times a day to let through all sizes of boats including some 1000ft monsters. Claxons sound, bells ring, traffic is stopped, the whole span rises horizontally, the boats pass, horns are sounded in thanks. It is a cacophony of sound, and happily doesn’t happen much at night as we were parked only 100m away. The town has that vibe that only a waterfront can bring and a cool regenerated area in the warehouse district near the bridge.

This includes a waterfront brewery that we might have found ourselves at a couple of times over the 44 hours that we were here. The waterfront bike/walking trail that had been so lovely on our last visit was a shadow of its former self and it transpires that later in 2017 it was savaged by two separate storms, ripping up the boardwalk and walkways. Again, when passing through a place like this on a warm, sunny, benign summer’s day it is easy to forget that winters can be brutal in this neck of the woods. Other things achieved here? I got a great haircut which was also remarkably cheap, two qualities oft not associated with each other. We broke out the bikes and cycled down the narrow peninsula near us to find a beach for a dip in Lake Superior, which was surprisingly warm. As we were sat on the fairly narrow beach two policemen came past on quad bikes, patrolling for bad behaviour and alcohol. All jobs have ‘the rough and the smooth’ I imagine for a cop in the USA, it doesn’t get much smoother than that.

After Duluth it was the last stretch before the border. On the way we procured an oil change for Big D and arrived at the border town of International Falls, Minnesota at lunchtime in the pouring rain. Was this the USA mourning our departure…?? We ate our picnic lunch in a petrol station carpark (all class, I know) and then, fortified, headed to the border. The border between the USofA and Canada is the longest land border in the world, don’t you know. Here it is demarcated by the River Rainy, over which there is a toll bridge, just to extract those last few US dollars before you leave. On the Canadian side of the river the road arrives in the back-blocks of a factory complex which I think is actually a paper mill and the short queue of vehicles wound its way around the buildings until we got to the immigration/customs booths. No so much a grand gateway border crossing, more of the cat flap variety. It was very informal with no paperwork to complete. Did we have any merchendise? No. Booze? Yes (A trifle more than we declared.) Cannabis products? No. Guns? No. Where did we live and when were we leaving to go there? Tricky. We stuck with NZ, given that we are travelling on those passports, leaving to go back to the USA in 8 weeks. (Immigration officers get a bit suspicious about the homeless and we didn’t even mention our joblessness.) We were granted admission and were instantly coughed out onto a street in Fort Frances, the town on the Canadian side. It was still raining and we were in, but more importantly, we were out of the USA.

12th – 14th July 2019

As we headed towards Chicago we took a modest detour to visit the architectural wonder that is the Farnsworth House. Fans of mid 20th century modernist design, like my husband, might already know of this small gem of a weekend retreat located about an hour from the big city, in the town of Plano.

It was designed by renowned German born architect Mies van der Rohe for a Chicago nephrologist, Dr Edith Farnsworth, the project spanning the lean post war years 1945 to 1951. It was cutting edge design, simple yet elegant, a single roomed floating glass box on the banks of the Fox River. It is a seminal piece of work, but perhaps a classic example of both the ability of an architect to push their thirst for artistic form over the client’s parallel need for function, and also to extend their client’s budget into the zone where cordial relationships degenerate into legal battles. It was a sweltering greenhouse in the summer, had no closet space, woefully inadequate roof drainage via a single internal downpipe and went hugely over budget. Dr Farnsworth’s peaceful retreat was never quite the perfect idyll that it may have been. Soon after she moved in a new state park was created just across the river from the house requiring the nearby road and bridge to be upgraded to accommodate the increased traffic. To do this the state of Illinois appropriated 2 acres of her land, making the house visible from the road and noisy due to increased traffic. She was very upset by this. Architectural snoopers also used to trespass onto the property for a closer look, often to be found faces up to the glass as she opened the curtains in the morning. This was disconcerting. In 1972 she sold the house to a rich British aristocrat and property developer, Lord Peter Palumbo. After 31 yrs of ownership, and some serious money spent on upgrades and repairing flood damage, he sold it at auction in 2003. After some tense bidding the house was bought by a consortium on behalf of The National Trust for Historic Preservation and is now a museum, saving it from potentially being uplifted and taken away. We took a tour and spent the whole time discussing amongst ourselves how we could tweak the design if we were to build a replica. It was gorgeous.

We jumped back into Big Dave and rolled on. The closer we got to Chicago the heavier the traffic got. It was a Friday. There were as many people going to the city as leaving. In retrospect it transpired that there was a weekend of baseball games and ‘Taste Chicago’, a food festival. It was going to be busy. The highway was chock-a-block, but we eventually arrived at our first destination: a place to park Big Dave and Tin Can. About 3 miles from downtown Chicago there is a big events and conference centre complex called McMormick Place. It has huge parking lots, including one where all the trucks for the events centre can park. Here, for a modest $35 bucks a day, you can also ‘dry camp’ in an RV if you hadn’t already gleefully booked a nice hotel in the heart of the city for the weekend.

We parked, grabbed our bag, called an Uber, and headed to our hotel, The Radisson Blu Aqua. (Apparently Lady Gaga used to own the penthouse of this building, dontchaknow) At last, after six weeks living in the cramped quarters of Tin Can, we had two nights on dry land: A super king sized bed, a bath, quiet air conditioning. Bliss! We chilled out for the rest of the afternoon, had a swim, a bath and waited for the arrival of our co-conspiriators for the weekend, Greg and Gigi. These are our friends who live in Connecticut and who were flying up for the weekend from New York. By 7pm we were all sat with drinks at the hotel bar, catching up and planning the weekend’s fun.

For fun, read mainly eating and drinking, obviously.

That evening we sampled deep dish pizza ‘pie’, Chicago style, at the highly recommended local institution, Pequods. By the time we ate (after an Uber ride, waiting 45 minutes for a table, several drinks, and then waiting 50 minutes for our pizzas to cook) it was 11.30pm and we were all starving and ready for our beds. The unanimous opinion amongst our council of four was that deep dish style was okay but not as good as thin crust. Too much bread, it was overwhelming. We ate it though. We would have eaten dead lizards marinated in crude oil by that stage.

In the morning we strolled through downtown and had brunch in a busy, popular spot called Beatrix. This was very good and they did some quirky dishes which included some actual real vegetables. Practically health food, although the second doorstep-sized piece of toast saturated in melted butter and honey might not have been strictly necessary. Much replete we decided to partake in one of the many boat trips that leave from the lower river. Ours was a combination of a cruise up the river with a commentary giving information about all the beautiful and notable buildings, then passing into Lake Michigan. Little known to any of us, there is a big lock separating the river and the lake. This has been necessary since they dug the river out in 1936-8, lowering the water level by 2-5 ft compared to the lake. This was to reverse the flow of the river and keep all the dirty water out of Lake Michigan which supplies the city’s drinking water. The lock can accomodate up to 100 vessels, making it the 4th busiest commercial lock in the nation and the 2nd busiest for recreational craft. The commercial vessels have priority to enter the lock and then the small boats and jet-skis get the go ahead to pile in and fill the gaps. It was organised chaos! The trip out to the lake gave a good view of the cityscape and all the sky scrapers.

The tall, the ‘previously-the-world’s-tallest-building-until-someone-else-finished-their-even-taller-building-two-weeks-later….Rats.’, the ‘mine’s-taller-than-yours-because-I-put-a-taller-pylon-on-top’, the ‘tallest-building-in the world-designed-by-a-girl….’ And so on and so forth. It is, for all that, quite a magnificent city. The downtown area was clean and pleasantly devoid of too much homelessness and pan-handling. The river was a pretty aqua marine colour and a hive of activity of boat tours coming and going, water taxis buzzing up and down, cruising rental boats adorned with the bikini clad (girls) and the naked chested (guys) and shoals of kayakers generally getting in the way of it all. The buildings are a fabulous array of the 1930’s gothic revival, art deco and the modern glass-clad monoliths. Even the Trump Tower was pleasing to the eye. There are a plethora of parks, green spaces, and cycle/walking paths. Sculptures, and play areas abound and any city with a waterfront and a marina is a winner in my book.

When returned to dry land we walked over to see Chicago’s most famous sculpture, Anish Kapoor’s impressive ‘bean’. It is very shiny and draws a good crowd of selfie takers. At this stage the boys felt they needed a snack and availed themselves of a ‘Chicago-style’ hot dog. This was a product of the Great Depression era and consists of sesame seed bun, a pickle spear, chopped white onions, tomato slices, bright green sweet pickle relish and an all-beef frankfurter. Traditionally it is accompanied only by mustard, not ketchup. It had too many vegetables for Nick’s liking, but did the job in keeping the wolf from the door. After this we all agreed that we had had enough sunshine for the day, called time-out and headed back to the hotel for some R&R. The evening brought with it another walk out into town, some cocktails in the open air bar of the stylish art deco ‘Gwen’ hotel and then dinner at a restaurant called Tanta. This served an unusual Peruvian-Southeast Asian tapas style menu. Interesting and very delicious and on this evening we managed to eat before it was nearly tomorrow.

On Sunday morning we had an early-ish brunch to give us time to have a final stroll before we had to go our seperate ways again. We headed through downtown, past a stretch of the famous Chicago ‘L’, the elevated railway, into the park and down to the waterfront, dodging the gazillion fellow walkers, cyclists and Segway tour members on the way. (Nobody, just nobody, looks cool riding a Segway).

It was a windless scorching day and the lake was flat calm and quite beautiful. This is stunning city in the sunshine. I hear it is a bit different in the mid-winter… An hour later, hot and weary, we arrived back at the hotel, called our respective Ubers, said our swift goodbyes and headed off in our opposite directions: Greg and Gigi to the airport and us back to Big Dave and Tin Can who were exactly where, and how, we left them. Which was nice.

We thrashed out of the city on a busy highway, the congestion made worse by people slowing to have a gander at the burnt-out truck on the other carriageway, which was backed up for miles. We had a surreal half hour of ‘watching’ the tense closing plays of two simultaneous neck-and-neck UK sporting finals: Wimbledon mens’ final and the World Cup Cricket final. This was by live text updates on BBC Sport, so a bit lacking in the visual impact of TV viewing, but beggars cannot be choosers and it was exciting nonetheless. (Disappointingly NZ lost the cricket…We were robbed….) We only had about 60 miles to travel to our next stop, a night in Union, just out of the clutch of Chicago’s ‘burbs.

6th – 12th July 2019

Illinois. It is the 6th most populous state in the US, with about 12.7 million people living here. Of those about 25% live within the city of Chicago, the USA’s third largest, and overall 65% of the population live in the counties making up the Chicago metro area. Illinois is Chicago, is Illinois. This really annoys the rest of Illinois, which otherwise is made up of many smaller cities and towns and vast farms growing maize and soy. There is also a lot of industry and natural resources such as timber, coal and petroleum. The state has been described as a microcosm of the country as a whole.

We were heading slowly to the ‘Big Smoke’ for a weekend rendezvous with good friends and had a few stops on the way up through the state to fill some time. First stop, three nights in a small city called Peoria. This is located on the Illinois river and is home to about 115,000 people and the well known Caterpillar brand. The wide variety of various Caterpillar equipment, diggers, bulldozers and dump trucks are all still manufactured in the town and surrounds and the company employs a lot of these people. It even has a visitor centre where you can take your boys who are fans of all things yellow. The city is also associated with the phrase “Will it play in Peoria?”, which originited from the vaudeville era and was popularized by Groucho Marx.

Our camp was a municipal park with a small marina on the banks of the river. As it passes through the city the river widens into a long lake with a seperate shipping lane, creating a safe boating area. Our camp didn’t usually have a good swimming beach, but due to the heavy spring rains that have affected all of the mid-west, the river/lake had burst it banks which had flooded all the waterfront tent camp sites, creating a rather nice place to soak. It was, of course, still very hot. This park has a large seasonal population, folks who rent a site for the whole summer. Interestingly a lot of these people seemed to be reasonably local and had all been coming for years. This made for a really tight knit group of people who were all friends with each other (despite differing views on the current President), and they were also really friendly to us. In fact, I don’t think that we have stayed anywhere where we have got chatting with as many people. Thank you for making us feel so welcome!

As soon as we arrived we off-loaded Tin Can. A task performed in 90F heat whilst we were hungry, a bad combination for good humour and marital harmony. We needed Big Dave liberated for a few reasons. One being our impending attendance that evening at Peoria Speedway, our first motorsport event in America, and another was to sort out the tatty decal on the front of Tin Can, a victim of an overly powerful jet wash last trip.

We set out for the speedway at 4.30pm and as we pulled out of the park it was 102F. For crying out loud. We made our way across town to the Speedway Park and took our place in the car park along side rows and rows of other Chevy pick ups. Big Dave could hold his own in this company. I am not so sure that we blended in so well. It was redneck nirvana and we were looking a tad Hampsons in the Hamptons. Happily it was a friendly/unobservant crowd who were far more fixated on following the progress of the cars.

The course was a small banked oval which seemed to have a swamp in the centre. The cars and ‘pits’ were on one side and the ‘grandstand’ (three sets of bleachers) was on the other. There was a beer trailer, a food trailer, toilets and zero shade. The entrance booth sold ear plugs and safety glasses: a clue as to how close up and personal this experience was to be. After a hot 30 minute wait, made bearable by a cold beer, the cars came out. It was noisy, dirty and fabulous! Each race was about nine laps long with the skill all being in holding a dirt drift around each end curve. There were several classes of car, all looking like variations of Mad-Max-Motors. There were a few spin-offs, a collision or two but no major crashes. We had no idea what was what, who was who, or which was which and we loved it. We stayed for about two hours by which time we had seen about half the races, our ears were bleeding, our faces were covered in track dust and we were starving. There was a popular BBQ restaurant just around the corner which was calling us.

The next couple of days we kicked up our heels and bashed about town in Big Dave, a bit like ‘normal’ people. We visited shopping centres, auto parts stores, a car wash and, of course, the Caterpillar Visitor Centre. Here they had a mock up of CAT’s biggest machine, the 797 mining dumper truck. It was massive. These cost 5 million USD each and can carry 400 tons per load. There is a mine in Canada running 350 of them… Caterpillar is definitely helping to shape/mis-shape our planet.

There were diggers that you could sit in and some simulators to play on too. Harder than it looks to shift soil, I can tell you. It was very interesting, with exhibits on engineering and the history of the company, including the digging of the Panama Canal.

Our chore of this stay was to sort out that old decal. Synopsis: 1. Reverse Big Dave under the front of Tin Can so his bed acts as a work platform. 2. Wash off 27 kg of dead bugs from front of camper. 3. Rinse. 4. Peel off old decal in thousands of small fragments. 5. Spray glue remover and spend an hour wiping off tenacious glue. 6. Get new decal, line it up, apply to wet surface, remove air bubbles. 7. Stand back and admire work. 8. Do all this whilst fielding friendly comments from the nearby audience of several of the aforementioned locals who were watching the whole show from across the way in their easy chairs, beers in hand. Performance Art?! 9. Cool off afterwards with dunk in flooded river. During this stay Big Dave also got some new bulbs in his headlights. We don’t often drive at night, but when we do, we previously couldn’t really see where we are going. Now we can, which is better.

Next on our Illinois journey was a place called Starved Rock State Park, a small state park alongside the Illinois river. It is a very popular park and sees a lot of visitors from the Chicago area as it is close enough for a day trip. It had an ominously large carpark at the Visitors Centre but luckily we were here mid-week so it wasn’t too busy. There was a large rustic lodge hotel on site and our wooded campsite was about 2-3 miles away. We had three nights and two full days here. On day one, despite the heat, we cycled to the park trails and set out hiking. There are about 13 miles of trails, taking in numerous mediocre sights such as lookouts, rock promontories and small canyons, most of whose waterfalls are dry at this time year. We planned to do about half of the trails on the first day and the other half on the next. But oh, it was so hot and humid. I haven’t been so sweaty and enjoyed a hike so little for a while. I was all for bailing and going back to the air-conditioned lodge for an ice cream at the 2 mile mark, but in a rare turn of events, Nick encouraged me to keep going. I was so sure he’d be turned by the prospect of an ice-cream. By the time we got back home it was 2pm and we were very weary, hungry and grimy. Lunch and a shower were medicinal and thus commenced a very lazy afternoon which bled into the next day. There was no way that either of us were going back out there. We did manage to create a breakfast sandwich (see below) and cycle to the Lodge to sit in the cool and tap into their internet for an hour or so.

So rested and refreshed on Friday and before the influx of the weekend campers arrived from the city, we packed up and headed in the opposite direction, into the heart of Chicago.

3rd – 6th July 2019

Apparently the 4th of July is a big deal in this country, and can get quite busy. If we wanted to find somewhere fun to be for these few days we needed to be organised and plan ahead. So a few weeks ago the chief travel planner ascertained that St Louis might be a place to be, if we could find a city RV park. More searching informed us that there was a park 2 miles from downtown and they had one space left. Bingo! We had a plan, and having left the Ozarks we pulled into camp on another hot afternoon. The park was started about 40 years ago when a couple bought a disused lot in the middle of gang-controlled depressed St Louis downtown. Every one thought they were mad, but good security made it safe, and now, run by their daughter, gentrification has enveloped it and they are sitting on a real estate goldmine. So far they have resisted the lure of the development dollar which means that many like us can have all the benefits of the city right on our camping doorsteps. It also had a very refreshing swimming pool, which was getting plenty of use.

St Louis, the largest city in Missouri has a fair few reasons why it punches above its weight, having only a population of 300,o00 in the city and 3 million in the metro area. The area was home to generations of Native Americans for thousands of years before the modern city was founded in 1764 by two French fur trappers and named for their king, Louis IX. A lost war against the Spanish saw it pass into the ownership of Spain that same year, and then back to the French in 1800. A small real estate deal called the Louisiana Purchase finally made it American in 1803. A busy few years for the flag makers. It grew quickly and by the 1870 census it was the country’s 4th largest city. It is now the 20th. It was a major port, sitting at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers (combining to create the 4th longest river system in the world) and trade, transport and manufacturing were major industries. People flocked to St Louis for work, and as a starting point for a new life, especially immigrants from Germany and Ireland, and its reputation as a gateway to the Mid-West was born. In 1904 the city was the first non-European city to host the summer Olympics and it hosted the World Fair. In the first part of the 20th century it saw a second influx of new residents during the Great Migration of Southern African Americans, also seeking a better life. Like many major cities, the mid 20th century saw changing fortunes in St Louis. Declining manufacturing, inner city depression, pollution, racial segregation and population decline all took their toll.

In 1965, its finer history was honoured by the building of its iconic arch, a symbol of this gateway status. It was a big and bold project. It stands 630ft/190m tall and is still the world largest arch and the Western Hemisphere’s largest man-made monument. Its size is magnified by the lack of sky scrappers in downtown St Louis and it still towers over the city-scape. Now the city is booming again.

The arch is far more impressive up close when you are standing beneath it looking up. It shines in the sunlight and it is uniform down to its feet which are planted firmly on the ground, without any pedestals or barriers. The small windows at its apex remind you that you can travel up to the top and look at the view all around. A view which is lacking one important thing. The arch. The riverside park in which the park sits is a designated National Park and this was the site for the city’s three day Independence Day festival.

The 4th of July started for us with a morning walk to find The Parade, a staple of the celebrations. There were lots of floats and marching bands but by 10am it was already 90F and very humid. The parade was a bit disjointed and spread out, and the poor bands looked hot, weary and wilting barely half way down the route. They were resting more than they were playing which unfortunately made it all a bit subdued too. We followed the parade route ending up at downtown, by which time we were weary and wilting too. We found a lovely cool (temperature) bar and had a couple of medicinal cold beers. A justified ‘elevenses’ on a national holiday, surely?

The festival served up drinks tents, food vendors, a few air displays and later, music and the obligatory fireworks. We watched an air display before heading back to camp via a pizza for lunch. This brings us to the adventure for the day…our first ride on e-scooters. The 2 mile walk home would have been easily achievable but it was so, so, so hot and humid! The streets were littered with scooters and we decided to take the plunge. They are brilliant! Admittedly one Uber would probably have been cheaper than two scooters, but what price the wind in one’s (damp, sweaty) hair and the rush of the near death experience of weaving through traffic and avoiding pot-holes?? We were hooked and used them several times over the next few days. I even mastered the art of carrying a large umbrella at the same time.

Early evening we scootered back to the arch to see what was happening. The music was in progress and thousands had converged with blankets and lawn chairs to sit on the grass and wait for darkness to fall and the fireworks to begin. The music was, of course, Country. We had one overpriced beer and listened to about as much country music as we could bear. Which was about one beer’s worth. I think we did well.

We extracted ourselves from the park, had a quick dinner at the same bar/restaurant that had revived us earlier that morning and went to a nearby hotel to see if there was space at their rooftop bar to watch the fireworks…No, nope, non, niet, nein. So as darkness fell we headed back to the arch and the crowds, ooohed and aahhhed at the impressive fireworks display and then had an even more exciting scooter ride back to camp in the dark!

The next day we had a general mooch around downtown. We started at a place called the City Museum, which is nothing like it sounds. It is more like a variety of bonkers installations created out of a bonkers collection of craziness, by a bonkers bloke, housed in a disused shoe factory. We queued in the baking heat to get in, and then realised that it was basically a bonkers playground for kids with tunnels, climbing frames, slides, stairs, crawling spaces and had no air-con. It was packed with young families and there was active encouragement for general rampage and mayhem. We lasted 30 minutes. I think we did well.

We recovered with a quart of frozen yoghurt each, and our next stop was the nearby Busch Stadium, home of The Cardinals baseball team. When he was about seven years old Nick’s grandparents had visited St Louis and brought him back a present of a Cardinals pin/badge. This was one of his childhood treasures and meant that he knew of St Louis from an early age. Not a common thing for a kid from Wigan. This meant that our trip here had also been a bit of a pilgrimage for him and felt a bit like completing a circle. Granny-Ann and Pop-pop, that one small gift had a big impact.

We really enjoyed our time here. It seems like a very liveable city and has a great self identity. People seemed happy and proud to call this place home.

29th June – 3rd July 2019

Until July 2017, most of the human population outside the Mid-West USA had no idea that a place called ‘The Ozarks’ even existed. This was when Netflix released the first TV series of ‘Ozark’, and suddenly this sprawling, narrow lake complex formed by the Bagnell dam and spanning the four states of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas, was thrust into the international consciousness. Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) and family arrive out of season to a sleepy, hick lakeside town ostensibly near Osage Beach, Missouri and, well you either know the rest, or you don’t. (On closer research it disappointingly transpires that none of the filming actually happened here in the Ozarks. It was all shot on lakes near Atlanta, Georgia due to favourable tax breaks.) We decided to add the Ozarks to our journey route. Our original plan to be here for the 4th of July but we hastily re-planned when we realised what an absolutely mad, crazy, bonkers place it becomes during ‘holiday-time’ and there was absolutely no available spaces in any RV parks anyway. We managed to secure a rare spot at a lakeside RV park for 3 nights only, leaving before the big party of July 4th kicked off. The photo below is a stock image of a place called Party Cove. This is the sort of thing that happens in the Ozarks during the 4th of July celebration week. Oh, the horror!

We finally parted company with our old friend, the US 50 and, Ozark-bound, we had a one night stop at a park in Clinton, Missouri. It was mostly occupied by long term and seasonal inhabitants and near another large, overflowing recreational lake. The park had a small pool, which was a godsend given the relentless heat. As a completely irrelevant aside, the owner had a very cute puppy: a Bernadoodle. A poodle-Bernese Mountain Dog cross. (Look it up, Mrs J!) On our way to the Ozarks from here we took a very justified 20 minute detour to call into a recommended cheese shop. We spent a small fortune on a block of 12 yr old cheddar, which was worth every cent. It’s like a bar of ‘cheese-gold’ and very, very delicious.

We approached The Ozarks via a winding and undulating, narrow and quiet back road. When we arrived it was, perhaps fairly unsurprisingly, not the quiet sleepy holiday idyl that we had imagined. There was a two lane highway running through each of the built up areas, lined with strip malls, restaurants, apartment complexes and boating services. Whenever we caught a glimpse of the lake we could see that every available inch (2.2 cm…) of shoreline was lined by floating boat docks. This is a serious Vacation Destination, and boating, floating, fishing and being dragged around behind a boat were the recreational activities of choice. Oh, and drinking booze too, obviously. Our camp was out off the fray but we had no plans to off-load Tin Can. We were content to hang out out at our waterfront niche, far from the madding crowd, happy in the knowledge that there was a waterfront bar/restaurant that was only 1.5 miles (2.4km) away. Walkable!

Our camp was on a small cove on the main part of the lake. The lake is long and thin with long, thin adjoining arms, all looking pretty similar. Lake navigation is aided by designated ‘mile markers’ which helps many an otherwise disorientated boater find all the various waterfront restaurants, fuel docks and home. We were at mile marker 3, being three miles from the dam. It goes up to about mile marker 67. There is a lot of lake here. Our camp had some floating docks and we discovered that there were a few boat rental companies that would deliver a boat here. Perhaps we could rent a small boat for a half day to do some exploring? After a few phone calls we changed our minds. We could either hire a small boat for a minimum of 24 hours, at great expense, or a large 14 person capacity pontoon party barge for a half day, at great expense. We settled for a boat-less Ozark experience, swimming off one of the docks in our cove.

Every day, one of the older resident ladies in our camp grabs her floating chair, puts a life jacket on her labrador, and takes it for a swim up the cove. It pulls her along on at the end of its rope and along the way she stops and natters to all her friends who are out on their docks. A perfect solution for how to exercise your dog in the heat! Apparently one day she fell asleep in her chair and the dog towed her all the way out into the main lake. People on the shore saw her and mounted a rescue mission, fearing that she had died. Only in The Ozarks.

We decided to walk to the nearby bar on the first of our three evenings here. The road out of the camp was too steep to cycle. We embarked on the 1.5 mile journey at 6pm. It was still 90 F. By the time we got there we were very hot and thirsty, possibly one of us was a bit grumpy and never before has a bar been so eagerly sighted. It even had its own pool with swim-up bar. If only we had known we would have brought our togs! We found seats at the bar, in the shade, in the stiff breeze of a nearby ‘big ass fan‘ (actual name), with a view of the lake. The beer was cold and we were happy again. Towards the end of the evening, after a few more beers and a tasty dinner, darkness began to fall and we were starting to contemplate our walk home when our bar server let slip that she was off home soon too. Knowing that she would have to drive past our camp, we brazenly asked for a lift and she agreed. Not that we had really left her with any sort of choice.

We otherwise spent a lazy few days floating around in the camp pool, keeping cool. There was not much else to do in the heat. It is sapping, and I’m not sure that I would ever get used to it if we lived somewhere as hot as this. Our Ozarks experience was a bit limited but at least we saw a little slice of it. Disappointingly, that didn’t include bumping into Jason Bateman.

24th – 29th June 2019

Kansas was the state that we had most anticipation about visiting but when people heard that it was on our route, they asked ‘why ?’ I can understand that reaction. At first glance, it doesn’t have much to offer the tourist. It is pretty monotonous terrain, with not much more than a few low undulations to break up the horizon. It has no major national parks or well known sites of historical interest. It is freaking hot and humid in summer and sits in the middle of the infamous ‘tornado alley’. Of course Dorothy knew all about that. For us, Kansas was a chance to leave the classic tourist routes and get back to the sort of road tripping that we enjoy most. Seeing the small towns, the quirky attractions along the way and witnessing a bit of ‘normal’ USA, whatever that may look like. Sometimes it looks vast, impressive and wonder-some. Sometimes it looks like a Walmart car park or a dilapidated home with junk piled up in the garden. US 50 continued as our guide and we left Colorado and rolled on into Kansas, the state with the strap line ‘Kansas, as big as you think’. (Although it is only the 13th biggest state by area.)

Kansas sits in the Central Time Zone, mostly. Except for four of its 105 counties on its western border, which remain in Mountain Time Zone with its neighbour, Colorado. How nuts is that? And who decided that was a good idea? It must be so confusing for people who go to work or school in the next county. In fact it seems about 13 states have time zone borders that don’t align with state borders. At least they all observe daylight savings time… oh wait, except for Arizona. Get your act together USA! And while you’re at it, can you please go metric. It really is about time you were with the rest of the world on this…oh wait, Britain is still a little bit imperial… Both of you then.

Where was I?

Kansas…

Home of the world’s largest hairball. We had to stop in Garden City to see this. It is housed in a small museum in a park, next to one of the most impressive municipal swimming pools I have ever seen. It is so large that you can windsurf on it (if you are good at turning, I imagine). The hairball was removed from the stomach of a steer in a nearby abattoir in 1993, and at the time was 55lbs. (24.9 kg). Now it is lighter as it has dried out. We toured the whole museum looking for this exciting thing, imagining that it wound be artfully displayed in its own cabinet, but couldn’t see it. Just as we were about to ask the ‘lady at the desk’ if it had been removed, we saw it. It was just plonked on the desktop next to her, balanced in a in a brass pot. You could touch, but not pick it up. It felt like velvet and was about the size of a basket ball.

We were underwhelmed, but I think our expectations had been artificially elevated. We rolled on.

Next destination? Dodge City. There really was only one reason to go to Dodge City, (well two, if you count needing to stop somewhere for the night,) and that was to…

“…get the hell out of Dodge…”

Dodge was a wild west town, an important hub for travel, trains and trade in the mid-late 1800s. Cows were the main commodity and this attracted gunslinging cowboys to the town. At the end of a long day’s work of doing cow stuff, the bars, gambling halls and brothels provided other recreational activities. The town was a booming frontier town until various quarantine laws moved the cow business further west in the later years of the 19th C. It was immortalised in the long-running TV series ‘Gunsmoke’ which spawned the now well known phrase. Our campsite was even called ‘Gunsmoke’ and greeted us with an archway adorned with a large ply-wood smoking revolver. Welcome!

After a month of relentless rain, summer has finally arrived to this part of the world with a vengeance. The daytime temperatures are now consistently above 90F/32C and this really affects daily life. It is now too hot to do anything physical outside, so the exercise levels have dwindled for the time being, and the AC unit in Tin Can is getting nearly constant daytime use. It is a bit too noisy to run at night. It is quite sapping and any opportunity to swim is taken.

Having ‘got out of Dodge’ we had a great drive, continuing along the mostly dead straight US 50 across the Kansas plains. There were huge wind farms with hundreds of turbines, miles and miles of maize and wheat fields and here the scattered nodding donkeys are pumping irrigation water rather than oil. The small towns along our way were mostly based around the huge grain silos of a farm which were built right up to the rail tracks to allow easy loading of grain onto the trains. The road brought us to a town called Hutchinson, the location for our next overnight stop. It is known for two main things: Strataca and The Cosomosphere.

Strataca is a salt museum, built in a disused salt mine, 200 m/600ft underground. The worlds largest deposit of rock salt was discovered under this area and mining began in the 1920s. The mine covers 980 acres in total and now open to the public as a museum, not only for the story of salt mining, but also as a climate controlled depository for old cellulose film and historical film costumes. We were not here for Strataca.

The Cosmosphere was the drawcard for our stop here. It is an amazing, world class space museum and scientific educational facility, in the middle of blimmin’ Kansas. It started in the 1960s as the small hobby project of one woman, Patty Carey, who had a passion for space and set up a small observatory in a disused chicken shed on the Kansas State Fairgrounds. One thing led to another and in its present incarnation it now houses the largest collection of Russian space hardware anywhere outside of Moscow, and had a pretty impressive collection of US stuff too. This included the actual, fully restored space capsule of Apollo 13 “Houston, we have a problem..”‘ fame, and a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird Mach 3 capable spy jet filling the lobby.

It also runs camps for adults here where you can do mock astronaut training. Something to think of when you can’t decide what to get your loved one for Christmas…We killed half a day here, and it was very impressive. This was the 3rd space themed museum of our travels. It was also air-conditioned, which was a big plus.

Post-Cosmosphere, our journey continued a short distance through neat and tidy Mennonite country to another short, one night stop in a small and slightly shabby RV park in a smudge on the map called Hesston. The next day saw us heading to the Tall Grass Prarie, a National Preserve, rather than a National Park. This is a new model for National Parks where the land remains in private ownership but is managed by the National Park Service. Tall grass praries used to cover about 400,000 square miles of the Great Plains, with barely 4% remaining, mainly here, in the Flint Hills of Kansas. They have a bison herd here, allegedly. We arrived 10 minutes too late to catch the tour bus through the park, and private vehicles were not permitted, so what did we do in the 90F plus heat? Yup. Go for a walk. After about 3.5 of shadeless miles walked, 2 L of water drunk and only two distant bison seen through binoculars we made it back to the visitors centre alive. Mad dogs and Englishmen….

Having anticipated the ongoing heat we had booked our next two nights at Eisenhower State Park which is on another reservoir. We could swim and keep cool…or that was the plan. The park was great, but unfortunately all the excess rain of the previous month had caused a lot of flooding and the reservoir levels had risen dramatically. This had swamped half the campsites, submerged some of the park roads and, horror of horrors, obliterated the nearby swimming beach. There was another swimming beach on another smaller lake about 3 miles away and as the temperature peaked, we decided to cycle there to cool down ( a slight oxymoron…) Luckily I checked for directions at the park office before we set off and were told that the other lake had closed for swimming that morning due to high e.coli levels. Good news- we discovered this prior to hot 6 mile round trip cycle. Bad news- no swimming…or was there???!! It transpires that if you ignore ‘road closed’ signs, road submerged by an overfull reservoir makes for a perfectly acceptable swim spot for overheated humans on a hot Kansan day. The inquisitive fish were slightly disconcerting though.

We met one of our nearby co-campers during the day, a chap who was setting up his trailer by himself, with his wife to arrive later when she had finished work. He needed a bit of help lifting something, so Nick obliged and then we got chatting. He was lovely and interesting guy, a Grateful Dead super-fan with a penchant for tie dye t-shirts and band-themed wall hangings. He also had an unparalleled ability to continually talk without drawing breath. We joined them both for a drink later that evening and he generously shared his favourite bourbon with us whilst maintaining constant, relentless, high volume story telling. We finally extracted ourselves at midnight, exhausted, without really having got a word in. His wife was surprisingly sane despite it all.

The next morning we moved on and towards Missouri. Kansas had been very hot but thankfully tornado-free. There are some things we don’t need to experience…