We’ve been resting up at home for almost 48 hours now, and it’s killing me. I’ve been going non-stop, catching up on the things that I’ve been ignoring for the past 6 weeks. Foremost, school is coming up and I have to sort out a) what I’m going to study at Osgoode this year, and b) how I’m going to pay for a).

We also have to prepare for the final third of the summer road trip. We’ve logged 14 840 kilometres so far, and I’m pretty sure we have another 5000 in us. The circumference of the earth is about 40 000 kilometres, so we should end up pretty close to half way around he world!

We haven’t decided if we’ll go east to the Maritimes, or south to Florida. The pull of the ocean is strong – it’s a question of the temperature of said ocean. We will likely go east because doting grandparents are waiting. Had better be waiting. It’ll be awkward if we pull in while they’re hosting a kegger for the neighbourhood.

The trailer needs some work before it’s ready to go back on the road though. I’ve replaced both wheels so far, obviously because one was in shreds and the other was so bald it looked like a racing slick. I also installed a new jack. The old jack stopped working about 10 days ago when the magic metal shavings fell out the bottom. Since then, I’ve had to lift the trailer off the hitch and maneuver it into position myself. So if you were wondering, it’s fricking heavy. When we weren’t going to use the car until leaving camp, I would save myself the trouble and just leave the trailer hitched.

There’s also a leak in a propane line somewhere underneath, and an electrical socket at the front – for when we have electrical service – isn’t working anymore. I would rather not explode into a ball of flame when cooking dinner, or set us all on fire by charging our batteries overnight, so those have to be resolved. The tarp needs repairs for small tears around the skirt and one of the cords for securing it down should also be replaced. Oh, a handful of screws have rattled out of place and require replacing. She’s beat up, but she’ll roll.

The car is in slightly better shape. The windshield and cloud roof are cracked from road rocks, the rear wiper gears are stripped so the back window is always dirty, the rear shock springs are like jelly, the trunk door sometimes latches, and the underpanel is coming apart. She rolls though. It’s a turbo.

I’ve also been getting caught up on photos. I’ve add imagery to posts up until about 2 weeks ago. Check back over the next couple of days and I’ll fill in the rest.

I quite liked the Agawa Bay Campground of Lake Superior Provincial Park. We woke there on the 10th, feeling refreshed and calm. Something about sleeping near the water is good for the spirit. Those Johnston Kids also had two motivations to start their day: the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, and potentially a long drive home. Home. Baby Girl started her entreaties early, to make sure that I knew it was important to her to get home ASAP.

I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t have made it out to the west coast and back in only 6 weeks without Those Johnston Kids. I would have stayed longer in places I liked, like Agawa Bay. I could have easily camped there for a week, in part because it’s like a freshwater version of the BC coast. On that morning, the water was as flat and calm as I’ve ever seen Superior. I really wanted to rent a canoe and go for a paddle, but the kids overruled me in favour of the bushplane museum.

We stowed our gear and got underway. The campground, I noted as we pulled out, seems to serve kayakers as the largest demographic. A great number of sites had trailers of boats parked nearby, along with paddles carefully stacked, and PFDs hanging to dry. I sighed mightily and took to the highway.

Sault was a little more than an hour down the road, so we were the first tourists through the Centre’s door that morning. It is entirely what the Royal Aviation Museum in Winnipeg is not: interactive and interesting. The RAM barely let you look inside a few planes, but at the Bushplane Centre several aircraft are open for you to climb inside and feel how horribly uncomfortable and claustrophobic flying really is. They also have 2 short films that are included with the price of admission, and a fairly well-designed children’s area with many hands-on stations. We ran through RAM in 30 minutes and Those Johnston Kids were bored for the most part, but we spent 2 hours in the Bushplane Centre and they were engaged the whole time. They had the cutest shirts in the gift shop that said “Bush pilot in training”. I couldn’t find my size. Pity. I would have loved to wear that to law school.

We didn’t reach consensus on whether we would try to make it all the way home from Sault that day. The run to Toronto would take about 8 hours if everything went well, but we could also camp at the halfway point, in Killarney, and go home in the morning. We decided to go as far as Killarney and see how we felt about another 4 hours in the car from there.

The drive was long, but we had some new tunes that I had loaded up for the stereo, and the weather was comfortable. When we made it to the Killarney turn-off, we resolved to continue all the way home and sleep in our own beds. Our moods were buoyant at the thought of Mama, pets, and familiar beds. We were 2 hours from home, just south of Parry Sound, when disaster struck.

We had just stopped for fresh tea and snacks and were back on the highway. Suddenly, the trailer began to sway wildly from side to side, rattling the car and forcing me to wrestle the wheel. I could feel grinding vibrating through the trailer hitch, and in the mirrors I could see scraps of shredded rubber decorating the road behind us. We had had a tire blowout on the trailer. I stopped as soon and safely as I could and pulled off the highway as much as possible. We were still uncomfortably close to traffic as there was a long guard rail alongside the shoulder. A quick inspection showed that one tire had blown, and the other was starting to delaminate, although it still held air.

I, cynical by nature, immediately suspected sabotage at the rest stop. The bad guys give you a flat so you’ll leave the trailer behind and go in search of help, then they come and scoop it up after you’re gone. It’s an old scam, also used by bike thieves in Toronto.

Luckily, we had a spare for the trailer. Unluckily, it used a brobdingnagian bolt size that did not fit our tire iron, or the largest socket in our socket wrench. I had never checked the size, because it just looks like a regular wheel nut. Lesson learned. After 6 weeks of non-stop travel, we were dead in the water only 2 hours from home.

Luckily, we had CAA coverage. After satisfying my manly conscience that there was nothing I could do to actually fix this problem on my own, I called the association and asked for help. Imagine my surprise when they said no.  You see, I have a basic CAA membership, which is what most people have, I imagine, unless those branded car air fresheners, or the upgraded bumper stickers, or the branded cheaply made car bag is important to you. Because my problem was with a trailer, and not my car, it was not covered. I needed the RV membership. I protested that I hadn’t even known there was such a thing, and that I would have surely purchased it because the whole point was to travel with a trailer.

Not to worry, they told me, you can upgrade to the RV membership. It will just take 24 hours to activate. Because my problem was that I only had a basic membership, and not basic plus or some damn thing, that would allow me to upgrade without delay. I was aghast. “You’re kidding, right?” I growled. “I have two young children and we’re on a highway in the middle of nowhere. Do you have any useful suggestions?” They offered to send a service vehicle, but I would have to pay for it. Well, okay then.

I was transferred to another woman who identified herself as Constable … something. OPP I figured.  She said that they would send a service vehicle out. I felt secure that our predicament had been noticed by responsible people and help was on the way. Those Johnston Kids and I dug out some lights, listened to music, and played video games on our handhelds while we waited. It was after dark before the orange flashing lights landed behind us, signalling the arrival of our rescuer.

The mouth-breather that stepped out of the truck barely grunted at me before digging out a socket set – bigger than mine I realized, to my embarrassment. While he pulled off the ragged wheel, I glanced at his truck and saw the name on the door: Constable Towing. These people weren’t connected to the OPP at all, they were just highway scavengers, preying upon those in straits. No more than 3 minutes later, the spare was in place. It hadn’t seen daylight in a while and was all but flat itself, the flaccid rubber folded up under the rim. The idiot looked at the obviously useless wheel and demanded $100 cash. I said, without checking, that I didn’t have that much cash in my wallet, and that I would pay by credit card. $140 then, he insisted, to ‘cover his mileage’. He took his payment and left, without offering to inflate the flat wheel. I had to jack the trailer up myself, and inflate it with a small emergency pump. It was about 10 PM, and we had lost 2 hours before we were mobile again.

Sort of. While the spare wheel was fine, the remaining original wheel was badly damaged. It was in danger of imminent failure so I couldn’t risk bringing it back up to highway speed. At best I was willing to push it to 60 km/hr and cross my fingers. 60 km/hr from Parry Sound to Toronto. 3 long, tedious, limping hours, with the emergency flashers on the entire way and annoyed truckers flashing their high beams into my brain. Then another hour across the city to home, while I feared every bit of cracked pavement or manhole cover was going to spell the end of our wounded wheel.

I will spare you further suspense. We made it home around 2 AM and slept in our own beds.

We’re here until the weekend, then who knows whither?

Those Johnston Kids were up at the crack of 9 on the 9th, although Baby Girl had to be hauled from her sleeping bag by main force. Her teen years will be a trial for everybody, I fear. All in a rush, we made use of the Kult Of America’s very clean shower facilities, scarfed down breakfast, and packed up the trailer. What was the rush? Mini-golf!

We hadn’t actually finished the 18 holes the night before, so the kids wanted another swing at the tee. Or Mulligan, or whatever it is golfers say. I am not a golfer. I have sworn not to take up the game until i an too numb to feel it, apologies to my father-in-law. Even in broad daylight, the course was challenging. Several of the holes were impossibly uphill. If the shot wasn’t a hole in 1, the ball would pleasantly roll right back down to stop at your feet or further back. It was maddening, but we finished. We determined that Short Pants was the winner because he had the highest score.

Well, after that it was just a road trip. The home-hungry kids, following significant lobbying by Baby Girl, decided that another longish drive would be best. We skipped a planned campsite on the Lake Superior north shore to go right on to the next camp in the itinerary. The day was overcast and quite cool, down to 12 degrees fire a while. The mix of air temperatures led to a real pea soup fog from Schreiber to Marathon. I thought it was neat, but there were many cautious drivers poking along the highway.

I saw another bear, shortly after we passed into Lake Superior Provincial Park. I saw it well in advance and called out to the kids. Baby Girl saw it and fumbled for a camera, but I don’t think Short Pants caught a glimpse. That’s one of the limitations of sitting in the back seat. There is lots of room, but visibility sucks.

We thought we might get as far as Sault, but as eager as I am for the comforts of home too, I am also reluctant to leave the wood and stone that is so familiar to me. I made an executive decision that we would stay in Lake Superior Park and enjoy it. This time through the Park, we found the Agawa Bay campground we had missed on our way west, and secured a site. Coincidentally, the gate officer lives a block away from us in Scarborough. He said it was rare to see anybody from home all the way up here, and there had even been one other reservation earlier in the summer from someone on our street, but they hadn’t checked in. Yeah, that is weird, I agreed.

The campground was great. It’s on a long, narrow strip between the highway and the gravely shore of Lake Superior. There are many big trees dividing up the campsites so it didn’t feel cramped. Naturally, as soon as we were set up, the kids ran for the beach, hang the clouds and spotty rain. We picked cool stones for a while and then one thing led to another and pretty soon bathing suits were involved. I warned them that Superior never warms up, but they’ve swum in glacial ponds in the Rockies and were unperturbed. I sat on the beach and watched in amazement as they rolled and sprayed in the surf. I could practically see my breath, but they just cackled at each other and ran in and out of the water. I don’t know where they get it. My people come from a desert country.

We had our first campfire in weeks! We cooked hot dogs to add to our dinner, and then sat around the fire afterwards, just enjoying the smell. There were a few biting insects, but the smoke from the fire kept them completely at bay. The day only demanded roasted marshmallows to be declared complete, which we took care of in short order.

Those Johnston Kids must have been tired because there wasn’t a word of complaint when I suggested we brush our teeth and tuck in. Traffic on the nearby highway was sparse and we were all lulled to sleep by the waves breaking on the shore just metres away.

It rained off and on throughout the night. It sounds romantic, listening to the patter of raindrops on the roof, but in real life it’s cacophonous. It’s not the muffled tapping of water on a wooden roof. The roof of the trailer is sheet metal so rain sounds like shovelfuls of gravel. With every new aggregate shower I stirred from sleep. It was a long night. I was tired when I finally rose on the 7th, at about 6:30 AM, and my crew was hours from rousing.

I had to go check in with the park office first thing anyway, as they didn’t have a self-registration. In most parks, when you arrive after hours, you can fill out a registration form yourself and drop your payment in a collection box. Not so at Rushing River. You can come in after hours but you have to sort it with the office as soon as they open.

As it turned out, the site we had shoehorned ourselves into, with an amazing display of backing up with a trailer in the dark, was reserved by someone else. In fact, they were supposed to be on it already, but had obviously run afoul of Friday night delays and not made it out. They could show up any minute, so we had to vacate in a hurry. I rushed back to the site and shanghaied Those Johnston Kids into immediately packing up. Breakfast would be sandwiches on the road.

Rushing River is a pretty campground though, and I entertained the thought of hanging about to go for a paddle. They didn’t have any onsite canoe rental though, and the rain was starting up again. I was reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes comic that the kids had showed me, where Calvin is on a camping trip with his dad. It’s pouring rain and dad is out in a canoe fishing, while Calvin and Hobbes question his sanity from the tent. I’m not sure why the kids thought they should show me that one. I think I remind them of Hobbes.

I like to say that the problem with rain in the wilderness isn’t that you’re getting wet, it’s that you’re trying to stay dry. Once you just accept being wet, no problem. I realise though, that it’s not so easy to be sanguine about exposure when you’re gypsies like us. We have no easy way to get dry again. When we get wet, the best we can do is reduce it to damp. We have to wait for it to stop raining before we can really dry out again. It makes me less inclined to play in the rain, even though I love being wet.

Even so, I feel a little guilty about just leaving without trying harder to find an activity. It feels like we’re being lazy. My guilt disappeared about as quick as the downpour started as we pulled out of the campground. Oh well, we tried. Who wants a Timbit?

We meant to stop after a few hours drive, at a campground neither you nor I have ever heard of, but the kids voted for a longer drive all the way to Thunder Bay. We have been on the trail for 6 weeks now, and they can smell the  barn. Baby Girl is jonesing for Mama and her pets in the worst way. Short Pants is also pleased at the prospect of a bit of homestay, but doesn’t mind pacing out the travel. He’s agreed to longer daily drives – geez, Canada is big – but mostly I believe he’s acquiesced for BG’s sake.

The rain eventually stopped as we drew near to Lake Superior, leaving us with an overcast sky and comfortable temperatures. We opened the sun roof, which I never do when it is actually sunny. It’s more of a cloud roof.

We ended up in the Thunder Bay KOA again and I can confirm that I wasn’t mistaken when we were here a month ago. There is a strange cultish atmosphere about the place. It’s family run, and it looks like the entire extended family is involved, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, a couple of grandparents, and maybe a dog. Everybody is both friendly and not friendly at the same time. There’s a biting sense of forced jollity. Those Johnston Kids were unaware and frequently remarked that they liked this campground. Maybe I am just old and grumpy.

We rushed through setting up camp because the KOA has a swimming pool. If they didn’t get to go swimming right now, they just wouldn’t be responsible for their own crazies. That meant that I had to go as well because in the nice/not nice campground, kids aren’t allowed in the pool without their responsible adult. They went swimming for an hour and a half while I waited on a deck chair with my laptop for WiFi that really wasn’t there. I mean, there was enough bandwidth to make me think it might work, but not quite enough to actually work. There is a metaphor for a bad date there.

I made salmon curry for dinner while the kids went to the playground. While they were there, they also went for a hayride around the campground, organised for the camp children by the staff. They sang songs and bonded in their lifestyle. Just like a cult.

Dinner was good. Normally, our protocol is to clean up right after dinner, but we left the dishes for later. It was getting late in the evening and we wanted to play mini-golf before the light failed entirely. We were practically playing in the dark anyway, not that it made much difference. The course was frustratingly hard and we all gave up on several holes. I seriously doubt hole 11 was a par 3.

As a wise man said, when you can no longer see your balls, it’s time to quit. We stumbled back to our trailer in the dark. I watched Those Johnston Kids take a very, very long time cleaning the dinner dishes, and then it was bedtime.

August 7th contained a lot of driving. Those Johnston Kids woke surprisingly early for a change, not that it helped us get moving any faster. I want to involve them in setting and packing up camp, so they have their own tasks. They don’t always (ever) work on the same schedule that I do though. I could do their work and my own quicker than waiting for them to finish, but I think it’s important that they have a non-trivial role. By the time they had finished, we were as late getting on the road as we always are, but we’re on vacation!

I never met my father and none of the partners my mother had when I was young stepped into the role. I don’t miss having a father figure at all, but lacking a model I’m really just making up this parenting thing as I go along. I fear that I’m making a botch of it. I just pray that I’m not doing so much damage that they won’t be able to recover when they’re older. They need to know that I love them, even when I’m a terrible father.

Else who will care for me in my dotage?

Breakfast was granola with the last of our blueberries, and warm fry bread made with the last of our buttermilk. Baby Girl wants to post instructions for making fry bread, so stay tuned.

Once breakfast was done, and the interminable process of cleaning the dishes was done, we packed up and went downtown. If you’ve been a faithful reader, you remember that this where we left our backpack almost a month ago, and it was waiting for us at the Lost and Found. We fairly skipped along to the Riding Mountain Visitor Centre.

Our story had gained some notoriety. The young lady at the counter remarked, “I heard about your pack. You went out west, right?” It was all very exciting. She went into the back for a while and came out with our bag! After offering our profuse thanks, we immediately tore into it, looking for Baby Girl’s camera, which was all we really wanted to recover. Getting my swimsuit back was okay too, but on the other hand, I’ve also enjoyed skinny dipping across the country.

Swaggering back to the car, we wondered what we might do next. Horseback riding was an option, but the sky was dark and ominous. I didn’t think they would even start a trail ride under the threat of imminent rain. Just then, as we debated, we saw a trio of kids go by on recumbent tricycles. Short Pants said he had seen where they were for rent and voted we do that instead, rain or no rain. Done. Anything to get them moving.

The bike rental owners also ran the town gas bar. They were affable and chatty, as it wasn’t a busy time of day. We secured the trikes and set out for a fun ride.

The vehicles were interesting as there was no steering, per se. The single front wheel was pedalled as on a regular pre-school trike, but the wheel tilted from side to side to steer, rather than rotating about a steering head. The seat was only a few inches off the ground between all the wheels, so it was extremely stable. Once the kids had figured out how to tilt to steer, they were off down the road. We rode over to the campground where there were far fewer and slower cars and spent an hour going up and down hills. Baby Girl wants her next bike to be a recumbent. Me too!

We left town after turning in our rides. The itinerary had originally called for us to spend the night in Winnipeg, but the city wasn’t far and we decided that we wanted to get closer to home. We set our course for Eagle Dog Tooth Provincial Park, east of Winnipeg. The 5 and a half hour drive was made even longer by the hellish amount of road work in and around Winnipeg.

We never did find the Park. Around 11 PM, we came to a service vehicle turnaround that Google claimed was the park, but was clearly not an entrance. Rushing River Provincial Park was about 10 kilometres away, so we just went there instead.

Arriving in a park after hours is like entering a stranger’s home by the window in the middle of the night. We didn’t know where anything was and crept around with our trailer looking for an empty spot. We weren’t fussy. Baby Girl was up and manically energetic, but Short Pants was out cold in the back. I just wanted to park and get them to bed. I shoehorned the trailer into the first open site we saw. The site entrance was closet-sized and a challenge to back into, so the neighbours came to watch my efforts after 7 or 8 back and forths. With their helpful navigation I was able to pilot our craft into port.

We fell into bed as quickly as I could pop the tent. We were road weary and homesick and sought the comfort of our familiar sleeping bags.

While Those Johnston Kids slept their way into August 6th, I woke up early to put change into the parking meter. The parking lot at the Holiday Inn Express in Regina could not accommodate our car and trailer, so I had to park on the street. It was raining cats and dogs when I went out. I had almost forgotten what rain was like. I tried to get back to sleep after buying time, but that never works for me. When I’m up, I’m up. Eventually the kids began to rustle the covers and I enticed them out of their blanket den like baby bears with the lure of the complimentary breakfast buffet.

I offered them two attractions in Regina, the Science Centre, or the RCMP museum. I was not displeased when they chose the Science Centre, and not only because science totally effing rocks and they will be scientists themselves soon. After the visit to Fort Walsh, I had had my fill of RCMP-flavoured jingoism and lopsided history lessons. I don’t think I could have handled any more tales of how the stalwart men of the Force had made Canada’s wild frontiers livable for civilised folk.

The Regina Science Centre was free, courtesy once again of our Ontario Science Centre membership. We paid a little extra for an IMAX film about the West Papua sea life, narrated by Cate Blanchett. The other IMAX option was a film about polar bears and the Arctic, narrated by Meryl Streep. I am not making this up. I would love a film about southern Africa narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio in the accent he did for Blood Diamond, but his career would have to dry up a little before he could get science centre films. Maybe Danny DeVito.

Every display was interactive in some way, which is great for kids. On the other hand, a lot of good science theory was omitted to make the displays more accessible. In the balance between information and entertainment, I think they’ve leaned a bit too much towards the latter. The kids – all of them, not just mine -tended to run up to a display and immediately start wrenching knobs and mashing buttons to make something happen. I didn’t once see a kid read the sign board. I suppose that’s why scientists are so few in number in our society. The inherent curiosity of the scientist is rarely cultivated. Wondering what’s on television next does not qualify.

The other complaint I have about the Centre is that the industry sponsors are far too apparent, both in signage and content. The agro business sponsored displays that encouraged kids to cut corners and use chemical fertilisers to increase yield when farming. More natural methods were discouraged as being low yield, and there was little to no discussion of environmental impacts of factory farming.

The energy sector was represented as well, teaching that coal and oil were reliable and cost effective, even though they produce pollutants. Wind and solar were dismissed as being unreliable and expensive. They even had a sick little survey that asked kids if they believed in climate change, whether it would be good for Canada, and if the government should do anything about it. This pretends that climate change is both a scientific debate and an issue subject to public whim. It is neither. Climate change is an undeniable fact, and potential solutions cannot be left to political convenience or popular opinion.

Worst of all, the nuclear industry sponsored a large walk-in display that extolled the virtues and safety of nuclear materials and power. According to them, spent fuel rods from reactors can just be stored until their radioactive emissions reduce to safer levels. They did not also say that the half-life of fissionable material – the time it takes for it to be half as lethal – is about 25000 years. So, you know, we’ll just store it until then. No problem.

There was nothing more we wanted to do in Regina, so we looked eastward again, to Riding Mountain National Park and the beach town of Wasagaming. It was a 4 hour drive, but Those Johnston Kids dozed on and off, it rained on and off, and we talked most of the way.

Just over the border into Manitoba, I saw a baby black bear hustle across the road into a stand of trees. At first I thought it was a dog, but as it ran across the ditch we came closer and I got a better look. Those Johnston Kids missed it, but it was real, I swear. Black as coal and breathing fire, with blood-red eyes that shone in the dusk.

Despite taking the ‘scenic route’ the bear was about all I/we saw on our way to the Park – except for bugs. Baby Girl thought it was raining at first, from the pattering on the car, and opened her window to feel it on her hand. By the time we arrived, the car was caked with bug protein. We could scrape it off with a spatula and spread it on toast, but we’re gluten free.

I forgot to mention. Short Pants lost another tooth last Wednesday. When he told me it was loose, I asked him to show it to me. “Don’t pull it out,” he pleaded, and opened his mouth.

“Don’t pull out this one?” I replied, showing him the tooth I had just pulled out.

Baby Girl also lost a tooth last week. “Papa,” she said, “my tooth feels funny.”

“That’s because it’s not there,” I answered. Somewhere between the start of dinner and the end, she had swallowed it. At first I told her that she would have to wait and – ahem – recover the tooth before it could be left for the Tooth Fairy, but I relented after she wrote a sweet and apologetic letter to the enamel fetishist.

I’m just trying to get them home with a few teeth left. I didn’t pack enough straws.

We left Reesor Lake Campground on the 5th, heading east across the Cypress Hills. I had no cell signal, so Google Maps was out, and our tattered paper map didn’t have enough detail. The Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park was just a green blot. Our destination was Fort Walsh, on the Saskatchewan side of the park. I just reasoned that there must be a road through the middle, even if I didn’t know exactly where it was. When I expressed my concerns to Those Johnston Kids, Baby Girl remarked, “I like getting lost.” I concur.

In any case, it didn’t last long. We found a sign pointing to Fort Walsh about 200 metres after we left the campground. That hardly lessened the adventure of it though. Try to imagine it: navigating by paper map and road signs. Crazy, right?

It was actually a pretty drive through the park. The road was windy and the hills scenic. Most of the park is being ranched, as far as I could tell. At least there were cattle everywhere and they didn’t look like the wild kind. We chatted to pass the time.

Fort Walsh is an historic site that is staffed with costumed period interpreters – people who dress and act like the inhabitants during the time of interest. The site was the scene of the Cypress Hills Massacre in 1873, when a group of American and Canadian hunters in pursuit of horse thieves massacred an innocent Assiniboine village. Between 20 and 100 men, women, and children were killed, depending on who’s account you believe. When Ottawa found out later in the year, it put pressure on the Canadian government to enforce law and order in the region. The crime was one of the initiatives behind the creation of the North West Mounted Police, the precursor to the RCMP. The other was the arrival of Sitting Bull and his Lakota Sioux in the area in 1876. They were fleeing retaliation from the American military after wiping out Custer and his army at the battle of the Little Big Horn. The government established Fort Walsh and made it the headquarters of the NWMP from 1878 to 1882.

My appreciation of Fort Walsh is limited, simply because of the history. The RCMP had 3 primary goals: establish law and order in the Canadian western frontier; convince the natives to give up their land and move to reservations; and assimilate natives into the general population. The first goal is laudable, in the wake of the Cypress Hills Massacre, but the other two are anathema. The perverse revisionist logic is that reservations and assimilation were necessary as the bison were all but exterminated in Canada, ignoring the fact that it was Canadians that did the exterminating. We toured the fort, but didn’t take part in the Mountie make-believe they had set up for child visitors. There was no troublesome-Indian make-believe for us to join either, although we did cast dark looks at the walls from the outside.

Honestly, relative to other historical recreations we’ve visited like Louisburg, Nova Scotia, or the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, near Edmonton, it was pretty lifeless. On a high note, they had a 4 month old calf, Molly, grazing around inside the fort. She was extremely gentle and seemed to enjoy the attention of kids. She was also ready for her bottle when we went over to say hello. Molly sucked on my finger like a pacifier until one of the staff showed up with a giant baby bottle. Calves have great sucking power and rough tongues. Baby Girl fed the calf for a little bit, then lost interest and passed the bottle to another swooning little girl.

Anxious to ‘cover some ground’, as Baby Girl put it, we drove pretty steadily from Fort Walsh to Regina, with brief stops in Swift Current and Moose Jaw for gas and bathroom breaks. I had thought we might stay at Buffalo Pound Provincial Park, but then remembered that we had no clean clothes left and finding a laundromat is never as easy as you might think. I called a couple of hotels in Regina before I hit on a Holiday Inn Express with a laundry and rooms with two queen size beds. WiFi and breakfast included for $132!

We arrived around 9 PM and I held squealing children in the shower until the water going down the drain ran clear again. It took a long time. A little Treehouse on cable, a lot of pizza, and they were out. I folded laundry until midnight.

I will get caught up on pics and links soon, promise!

We started our day on August 4th with an early hike along the Writing-On-Stone Hoodoo Trail. The cloudy sky granted us a reprieve from the previous day’s heat. It was about 24 degrees under a grey sky at 9 AM when we set out. It’s less than 3 kilometres one way, and not challenging, so you wouldn’t expect it to take long. The landscape is so incredible, however, that it’s impossible for kids to rush through it. Places must be explored, secrets discovered.

The kids immediately remarked that the stone formations looked like the houses in a Dr. Seuss book, and its easy to see why. The fantastic swirls of sandstone do seem to be the creations of a light-hearted and whimsical spirit. The Blackfoot say that this is a sacred place, but I can’t believe that Blackfoot children didn’t also just find it cool. Aside from the rattlesnakes and scorpions, and potentially crippling falls, the Seussian formations would make an amazing playground.

Back at camp, we packed up in a leisurely fashion. I stopped to chat with our neighbours. They were a retired couple who had sold their house and moved into a travel bus. Travel buses are the pinnacle of the RV food chain. They don’t get towed, they tow other vehicles. They are the great whites of the road.

Before we left the campground, we stopped in at the office to buy slushies. They had run out of lids for the drinks, but I bought them anyway, rationalizing that we would be careful. Back in the car, Baby Girl juggled her full drink in one hand, while trying to put on her seatbelt with the other. The cup was dangerously close to spilling red sugary liquid all over her, so I took it from her to free her hands and spilled it on myself instead. Then it wasn’t so full and she could take it back while I changed my shirt. My shorts looked like I had had a very bad zipper accident.

We drove on stickily towards Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, straddling the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Thankfully the day was cloudy and cooler than the previous two. In this hot, dry country we were grateful for the lack of sunshine; it made the drive bearable.

In Medicine Hat, besides stopping for gas, we went in search of knives, to replace Baby Girl’s knife, lost on Castle Mountain, and mine, given to Baby Girl to lose on Castle Mountain. We stopped at an outdoor store called Valhalla Pure. I’ve never heard of it, but it seems like a chain. Inside, the impossibly clean and pretty salesperson asked if she could help. She was dressed in a yoga outfit, black pants and light blue tank top, and was snacking discreetly from a baggie of trail mix with not too many Smarties to cross the line into junk food. I asked for her knife selection, suddenly aware that I was wearing three days of beard, my hair was styled by wind and neglect, and half a raspberry slushy decorated the front of my shorts. She was a consummate professional, however, and merely curled her lip in light amusement rather than full-blown mockery. As she rang up our two new knives, I noted that her armpit was shaven smoother than a baby’s cheek. I have been in the wilderness a long time. The bears I run into on the trail are much coarser.

Our next stop was just down the street, at a drugstore post office, where Those Johnston Kids bought stamps for postcards home to Mama. We just missed the mailperson who was emptying the mailbox out front as we were going in to buy stamps. When we told the counterperson inside about the disappointing miss, she literally ran out the back door with our postcards in order to make the rear pick-up. Small-ish town people are great.

Finally, capping our brief visit to Medicine Hat, we paused in a bakery on our way back to the car and bought nanaimo bars for the road. Ironically, I don’t recall buying nanaimo bars in the actual Nanaimo. The medicine hat bars were good though.

Cypress Hills is a big park with many campgrounds, but we settled on Reesor Lake, trailer friendly and set out in the bush, far from any roads or tracks. On our way there, I missed a turn and only discovered the mistake when the next sign was for the border with Montana. I was tempted to go see the Sweetgrass Hills, but we corrected course instead.

Reesor Lake looked magical as we came down the hill from the west and around the end of the lake. The water was calm and dark green in the late afternoon light and pelicans glided across the water stately and aloof. We saw large fish jumping to catch low flying bugs, spreading ripples across the quiet water. We guessed that the fish explained the presence of so many pelicans.

We drove on to the Cypress Hills, Reesor Lake Campground and found an empty spot. Things are a lot calmer out on the road, now that the long weekend is over. Campgrounds are half empty and quiet again. Of course, ours wasn’t for long. Those Johnston Kids discovered that our camp neighbours had two young children as well and we were both across the gravel road from the playground and sward.

I let them work off an afternoon drive’s worth of energy. It involved really disturbing levels of screeching. I would have asked them to tone it down, but the other kids were at about the same volume and none of the other parents seemed concerned.

While they worked out how best to hurt each other, I made fry bread, or bannock, or scone, depending on your custom. Can you believe that I haven’t had a chance until now? The neighbour’s little girl invited herself and her mother over to have some and I was happy to share. Everybody agreed that it was really good and I don’t know how to make just a little.

After dinner we played a card game called Timeline, at Baby Girl’s insistence. It’s a historical game with simple rules. You have a hand of cards, each containing an historical event, with the date on the back. You take turns placing a card down in historical sequence. If you place it incorrectly, you discard the card and take another. The objective is to correctly place all your cards so you have none left. The amusing thing about our game is that I placed my cards as well as I was able, but then she would ask me on her turn where she should place her cards. It gave me lots of opportunity to teach science and history, but it was like I was playing with myself. Typical, really.

On August 3rd, we woke to see the Daisy May Campground in daylight. It was a dense collection of RVs and an attenuated collection of services. Worse, all the services were clustered around the house of the live-in proprietors.

It is easiest to describe what the clientele of Daisy May are not: thin, young, vegetarian, or brown. Even the children were chubby old white people in kid suits. The washrooms were shrines to their self-destructive dietary habits. Seriously, they could have used a fan up in that joint.

On the plus side, they only charged us $25 for the night, because we didn’t get to use the pool.

Despite the shocking rankness of the washrooms, the opportunity for a shower was too good to ignore. We cleaned ourselves up, trying not to get any, you know, air on ourselves.

Our first stop of the day was the World Heritage Site Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. This was a place where, for thousands of years, the Plains people had hunted bison by stampeding them over a low cliff. They left behind an archaeological treasure trove, revealing the lifestyle and culture of First Nations people pre-contact. Until a few hundred years ago, they didn’t even have horses, so the hunt was conducted entirely on foot. You have to witness the vastness of the prairie to appreciate how incredible that was.

The site has an excellent museum now, explaining what the People believed, how they lived, and the significance of the bison to their existence. The bison was their primary source of food, tools, clothing, fuel, and shelter. It’s difficult for us, with the stunning heterogeneity of our economic system, to comprehend how utterly they depended on this one animal. And how utterly bereft they must have been when bison were eradicated in Canada by the obscene slaughter visited upon them by colonials.

I think Those Johnston Kids found it interesting, but it’s hard to tell. If an attraction isn’t immediately tactile or active, they’re not that effusive about it. But a month later they’ll throw out some odd bit of information about the place that was significant to them. The one thing I am certain captured their interest this time were the bison options in the cafe. We are vegetarians but they wanted to try bison. I would not for a moment allow a fast-food burger or other pedestrian meat, but this was okay with me because it had an important cultural connection.

I was hoping for bison ribs or steak, or even jerky. Unfortunately, the cafe only offered ground up bison in the form of burgers, stew, or chili. We shared a bowl of the chili. Not exactly the profound cultural experience I was hoping for, but they liked it. Baby Girl said that she could live on bison all the time.

I wanted to bring the kids to Head-Smashed-In because it’s a special place. One important thing about is that it’s an Indigenous place being run by Indigenous people. We need more of those in Canada.

It was a hot day, pushing about 32 degrees. I’ve heard Toronto has been seeing higher temperatures, but people in Toronto probably aren’t spending the afternoon in a dark car with no air conditioning. We drove across the dry southern Alberta terrain to Writing-On-Stone Provincial Park, with our tongues hanging out the whole way. We were all wet with sweat when we finally pulled into the campground.

The campground there is a mix of gravel and sand, slightly softened by some thirsty looking cottonwood trees. It’s actually quite nice in an austere sort of way and is situated in the valley of the Milk River, a shallow sandy waterway with a surprisingly strong current. The Milk River is unique in Alberta as being the only river that drains to the south, to the Missouri/Mississippi basin. At the time we cared not a whit for the hydrography of the thing, we just wanted to immerse ourselves in it. Our fervour was dampened by the warning we received at check-in that the water in the river was under an advisory and swimming was at our own risk. We took our risk for a swim. I considered it a teachable moment anyway. How many of you have had to explain faecal coliform bacteria to your kids? We kept our heads and faces out of the water and seem to have survived. Our swim was followed by a good rinse though.

Our relief was temporary as the heat continued through dinner and topless game of SkipBo. Baby Girl won again. She’s turning into a real shark.

We slept on top of our sleeping bags for the first time. Oh, how I longed for the cool nights in the mountains.