Travel blogger Q&A: Saskatchewanderer Andrew Konoff

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Last week, Gadling launched a serious road trip series. Called Traveling the American Road, it has wasted no time in turning up some exciting material.

Meanwhile, north of the 49th parallel, Andrew Konoff is busy wandering around his home province of Saskatchewan, uncovering secrets and sharing his discoveries with the world.

This summer, Andrew is the Saskatchewanderer. We’ll let Andrew explain his exciting gig.

Q: Define your profession.

A: Normally, I’m a university student. I’m an honors major in philosophy, with a serious interest in creative writing. This summer, I get to be the Saskatchewanderer: I use social media to promote my home province and all the things to do, see, and eat here.

Q: Tell us about the Saskatchewanderer project.

A: If you’ve heard about The Best Job In The World, which was responsible for many viral videos in 2009, then you’ll get the idea for this one. Aspiring students had to submit videos that explained why they should be the Saskatchewanderer, and then a shortlist of ten candidates was voted on by the public. There were three rounds, right in the middle of finals, and I ended up with the job thanks to my enthusiasm about Saskatchewan, my great supporters, and my serious commitment to procrastination.

These days, I wander. I work with my boss to set a rough agenda for the week. I get out on the road in my sponsored Ford Focus, and then I try to fill in the rest of my outings by relying on local knowledge, whether through Facebook and Twitter or through more traditional resources like tourism offices and diner staff.

Q: What’s your background as a traveler?

A: My family has always been keen on travel, but more recently I’ve started to understand the usefulness of travel in my own life. I did the Mongol Rally last year, and I learned a lot of great life lessons along the way. It turns out that spending 14,000 km in a small hatchback with one other person is a great catalyst for personal discovery. I did a Europe trip a couple years before that too, and that’s when I realized how much I love food, and that it can intersect beautifully with travel. I had my first tasting menu experience in Prague, and have been nuts about food travel ever since. This interest has driven me to do things like drink fermented horse milk in Mongolia, which I think I featured in one of my entry videos for the Saskatchewanderer competition.

Q: And as a travel writer, blogger, and social media agent?

A: Wow, I’ve done all those things? Travel writing and blogging are sort of a package deal for me, though perhaps this job will give me the confidence to try to get articles published. As far as social media go, I’ve been fairly involved around campus, and communications is a role I fell into pretty naturally. Starting up blogs and Facebook pages helped me in fundraising for the Mongol Rally and in getting the University of Regina’s Arts Student Association back up and running. Generally, if I’m passionate about something, there’s no better and more direct way to communicate that passion than through social media.Q: Saskatchewan isn’t nearly as well known as, say, British Columbia and Alberta. What should visitors to Canada know about your home province?

A: First and foremost, Saskatchewan is not just what you’ll see on the Trans-Canada Highway. Go off the road for an hour in any direction and you’re well into adventure territory. And if you treat Saskatchewan as a destination in itself, you’ll have a ton to see and do. We have over five million acres of parks, lots of music festivals (Saskatchewan Jazz Festival, the Regina Folk Festival and Craven Country Jamboree all draw huge crowds and big names), tons of history, and a rural and urban landscape unlike anywhere else in the world. Whether you need to escape from civilization for a while or get fully immersed in it, Saskatchewan has something for you.

Q: What have been your favorite spots thus far, and where are you most excited about visiting next?

A: I have become a huge fan of our national and provincial parks. Getting out and hiking a trail through anything from forest to sand dunes to prairie is the perfect way to relax after a long drive. Over The Hill Orchards is another place that I really liked.

Coming up next month is the Saskatchewan Jazz Fest, where some huge jazz rap names are showing up, like De La Soul and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest. It will be an amazing show. Also, The Sheepdogs are playing. They’re from Saskatoon, and they’re finalists in a social media-based competition to be on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

Q: I fell in love with Labret last summer. Any plans to include it on your itinerary?

A: I’ve already been! Pretty unbelievable scenery, hey? Funny story: someone posted on my Facebook page that they saw me climb up the valley there. I wish they had introduced themselves! Anyway, I plan on getting back out to the Qu’Appelle Valley for some wakeboarding adventures, and I suspect that will be the right occasion to make a post about Lebret.

Q: What will you do after the Saskatchewanderer project ends?

A: I’ll be moving out to Halifax with my girlfriend, where I’ll be finishing up my degree and writing a novel. I’ve got another blog idea kicking around, too. I’ve always wanted to work in a kitchen. I think I’ll find a good restaurant where I can start off as a dishwasher and work my way up the line and blog about the whole thing.

[Image: Susan Birley]

Canadian prairie road trip day three: Regina-Winnipeg

by Alex Robertson Textor on

On the third and sadly final full day of our Canadian prairie road trip adventure, we wake up slowly in Regina. We race around the city before taking off for our long journey to Winnipeg, first stopping at a bakery and convenience store in the Cathedral Village neighborhood, and then dashing over to the bustling Atlantis Coffee at Hamilton and Victoria, where the espresso is good and the cashier sports stylishly thick plastic frames.

From here we set out along Provincial Highway 44. Our first planned stop is the village of Labret, a small village with the Stations of the Cross erected across its hillside. Somehow, due to my navigational distractedness, we miss the turnoff for Highway 10 in the town of Balgonie and end up on a minor road, mesmerized by the fields of wheat, mustard, rapeseed, and flax. The last of these is a bluish violet.

We keep driving. The clouds became more dramatic and we have to stop to take more photos. Here the dragonflies are thick and eager and the stillness is profound.

Once we’ve sorted out our path we end up in Fort Qu’Appelle and check in at the visitors’ center, which doubles as an art gallery. Some of the accents here are deeply Saskatchewanian, and I have trouble for the first time trying to understand a local. We are given a tour of the galleries, which showcase the work of area artists.

We pass on to the tiny village of Labret. The village is beautiful in an epic manner, completely worth the detour. SK Books & Collectibles, a vintage bookshop, is stocked with 17,000 books, including tons of first editions and rare books. The shop has an especially strong collection of Western Canadian history and culture titles. “How could you ever get tired of this terrain?” I ask the bookstore’s owner. “I never do,” he responds.Labret boasts an enormous stone church and a hillside Stations of the Cross. We walk up and check out the incredible views from up top.

Following Labret we drive through lakeside cottage country. One settlement, Sandy Beach, is so charming that I’m suddenly beset by cottage envy.

From there it’s a long, straight shot to the visitors’ center at the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border, where we pick up a photocopied map of Brandon, Manitoba’s second biggest city. Later we circle downtown Brandon before stopping for a late lunch at Lady of the Lake, an enormous boutique/restaurant. My sandwich is delicious. The boutique side of the Lady features a table devoted to Manitoban body care products. We drive on for another 90 minutes to Portage La Prairie.

Our penultimate stop is here, at the very fine Horfrost Restaurant. That this restaurant is located in Portage La Prairie, a town with fewer than 15,000 residents, is a wonder. Horfost is an outstanding restaurant with a strong locavore focus, a place so exciting that it merits inclusion in another post. But here’s a teaser trio: fried pig’s ears, bison spring rolls, maple fries.

From Horfrost we speed through the night to West Gate Manor, a bed and breakfast in a leafy Winnipeg neighborhood, where we spend the final night of our road trip. Portage Avenue’s lights and traffic roll out to greet us. This is not Winnipeg at its most charming, granted, but it serves as a dramatic narrative bookend to our journey, a goodbye to the vast prairie behind us.

Read the entire road trip series here.

Some media support for this road trip was provided by Tourism Saskatchewan. All opinions belong to the author.

Canadian prairie road trip day two: Saskatoon-Regina

by Alex Robertson Textor on


Our proper road trip begins early at Saskatoon John G. Diefenbaker International Airport. We are headed to Regina via Moose Jaw, and not a moment too soon. We’re stir crazy and we can’t wait to get on the road. We pick up our rental from a grinning car rental company employee and we’re off. As we round Saskatoon, not yet into the suburbs, we can already see flat prairie fields.

About a half hour outside of Saskatoon we see the sign for Blackstrap Provincial Park (see above) and decide to take a detour. The entrance for a single car is C$7. The park centers on Blackstrap Lake, a long finger of a body of water. The park is on one side and a handful of houses cluster on the other. It is so picturesque and serene, even with a few motorboats puttering along. A family swims in the swimming area and a group of retirees settles down for a picnic. We wade around in the blissfully cool water before moving on.

Fields of wheat, mustard, and rapeseed alternate across much of our journey. It’s difficult to convey just how beautiful these fields are in mid-summer. They’re not showy or dramatic. They’re straight-forward, and while no field is identical to the last, the color palate does not vary much. Their beauty is nonetheless striking. We wondered out loud over and over why the highways weren’t full of summer visitors eager to see the fields in their fullness.

Later the landscape changes quickly as we pass through Buffalo Pound Lake. Here, another long finger of a lake disrupts the terrain. That there is a Provincial Park nearby is not surprising.

Moose Jaw, 226 kilometers (140 miles) southeast of Saskatoon, is hot and bright and dry in the mid-afternoon. We wander into a downtown tea house called Renate’s Tea Time with a refreshing drink in mind, but the dessert menu looks so inviting that I order an apple strudel. I ask the distinguished-looking server if she is Renate and she replies in the affirmative, and in German no less. It turns out that Renate of Renate’s Tea Time is a Liechtensteiner! The probability scale crashes. Who knew how far and wide Liechtenstein’s diaspora had expanded? Perhaps it goes without saying that Renate’s strudel was terribly, ridiculously good.
Mac the Moose, about to get his ass kicked by your faithful correspondent.

On our way out of town we stop at the tourism center and meet Mac the Moose, the enormous moose replica that serves as the city’s icon, just off the Trans-Canada Highway. We also meet Henri-Philippe Lamothe, an avid bicyclist currently biking from British Columbia to Montréal. Henri is taking just two months to cross Canada by bike.


Henri-Philippe Lamothe, trans-Canadian bicyclist.

After arriving in Regina, we scurry on to Crave, a restaurant and bar located on the ground floor of the storied downtown building that housed the Assiniboia Club, an elite men’s club, until 1994. Crave is subdivided into a number of dining and recreation rooms of varying sizes. It’s a very appealing concept, and its execution works so well due to a careful renovation job. Owner Craig Perrault joins us for a beer and several small courses. The kitchen’s offerings are all very tasty and fresh. This isn’t bar grub by a long shot.

After dinner we walk through Regina’s downtown and Cathedral Village neighborhoods. The crowning glory of the former is Victoria Park, a huge block of dense trees organized around a Cenotaph commemorating fallen military heroes from the city. Cathedral Village, named after the imposing Holy Rosary Cathedral at its heart, is Regina’s funkiest central ‘hood. It’s home to a number of quirky small businesses and the annual Cathedral Village Arts Festival, which is held in May.

Upcoming events in Regina include the Regina Folk Festival (August 6-8) and the Great Saskatchewan Mustard Festival (August 8). Be sure to pick up a copy of the independent fortnightly prairie dog newspaper for a blast of principled local political irreverence and cultural listings.

Read the entire road trip series here.

Some media support for this road trip was provided by Tourism Saskatchewan. All opinions belong to the author.

Canadian prairie road trip day one: Calgary-Saskatoon

by Alex Robertson Textor on

The first day of our three-day road trip had to be reworked when we discovered that it is impossible to arrange a one-way car rental from Calgary to Winnipeg. After a half-day spent checking out the appealing Boho mish-mash of Calgary’s Inglewood neighborhood, we nabbed a ride to the airport and checked in for our almost completely full flight to Saskatoon.

The Calgary airport, much like Calgary itself, is bold and busy, with remarkably low-stress security lines. Note to the TSA: please take a look at Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) protocol. Thank you.

The flight was very short, so short in fact that it left me unable to come to any sort of pithy summation of the airline, but I can fairly claim that WestJet flight attendants are unquestionably cheery. WestJet, for the uninitiated, is sort of a Canadian cross between Southwest and JetBlue.

The airport in Saskatoon is bright. It smells fresh and new, and there are hanging plants that give the gleaming space a ribbon of color. Saskatoon’s cab drivers talk about the oil, potash, and uranium resource wealth of the province. That the population is also increasing is a fact so obvious that it comes into conversation almost as an afterthought. We had the good luck of meeting two chatty cab drivers, one a hilariously sardonic fellow who lamented the Disneyfication of Times Square; the other a transplant from Toronto who told us that we had to see the Bollywood film My Name is Khan. The prairie’s legendary friendliness is real, and it’s also catchy.

Saskatoon’s downtown is well-serviced with shops and businesses, though it is utilitarian. The city’s trump card is the South Saskatchewan River, which bisects it. The park along the river is absolutely gorgeous, so idyllic it overwhelms the senses. During our stroll, joggers, bikers, and loungers were taking advantage of the riverside park.


University Bridge across the South Saskatchewan River.
Saskatoon centennial monument.

In the evening we walked across the Broadway Bridge, with its dramatic views of the river and downtown. Our goal: Calories Bakery & Restaurant, a Saskatoon institution that sources much of its menu locally. Our evening there was lovely, with a fantastic menu and a disarmingly charming waiter. The Caprese salad, organized into a tower, was brilliant, as were the courses that followed: duck confit over polenta and slices of cake served to share.

Calories is located in the funky and appealing Broadway neighborhood, which centers on the relaxed and wide avenue of the same name. Stand out Broadway retailers include the Bulk Cheese Warehouse delicatessen (732 Broadway Avenue), a free trade shop called The Better Good (640 Broadway Avenue), and the Vinyl Diner (628B Broadway Avenue), a music shop.

The walk back to downtown, just past sundown, was everything one could want from a summer prairie sky: glorious streaks of red across an enormous expanse of fading blue.

Saskatoon is fresh. As Saskatchewan thrives economically and its biggest city continues to grow, Saskatoon will continue to be a city to watch.

Upcoming events include the Saskatoon Fringe Theater Festival through August 7 and Folkfest (August 19-21).

Read the entire road trip series here.

Some media support for this road trip was provided by Travel Alberta and Tourism Saskatchewan. All opinions belong to the author.

The great Canadian prairie road trip: Calgary-Saskatoon-Regina-Winnipeg

by Alex Robertson Textor on

This road trip had its genesis in idle travel fantasy chat, as so many journeys do. A few months ago my friend Melissa and I discussed how much we wanted to do a road trip together over the summer, and we cranked out a number of ambitious itineraries. The craziest of all involved Melissa driving 18 hours by herself from Colorado to Alberta to pick me up prior to an eastward run across Canada. Perhaps it’s best, all things considered, that this particular itinerary did not work out.

Time and other constraints meant that we had to curtail our ambition just a bit. We settled on a four-night Calgary-Winnipeg itinerary, with stops in Drumheller, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, Regina, Brandon, and Portage La Prairie, a distance of 1486 kilometers or 912 miles.

Sounds great, right? Not so fast, cowboy. It turns out to be difficult to orchestrate a Canadian prairie road trip with a rental car. One-way car rentals are scarce in Canada. In fact, we were unable to find a single car rental company that would let us pick a car up in Calgary and drive it to Winnipeg.

After exhausting online booking site options, I turned to Twitter. The ever-generous travel writer Eva Holland suggested we take a look at Rent-A-Wreck. We did, and were disappointed to discover that the outfit doesn’t operate in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The rather less literally helpful Grant Martin suggested that we purchase the PaceSaver Plus III Electric Scooter that he so kindly found on Craigslist.

We even looked into the possibility of renting a U-Haul, rejecting that option because it was too expensive. Thinking that there might have been some secret I’d missed, I even checked in with the very helpful logistics team at Travel Alberta. Again, no dice.

Disaster! How would we ever consummate our Canadian prairie road trip?
Fairly easily, as it turns out. Once we started scrambling everything fell into place quickly. We found a one-way Winnipeg-bound car rental originating in Saskatoon. And then we found a cheap one-way fare on WestJet between Calgary and Saskatoon. (A silver lining was already emerging, as I’ve wanted to fly WestJet for some time.)

Cutting out the first day on the road means that we’ll miss some beautiful territory across Alberta and Saskatchewan, Drumheller in particular. In place of that first day on the road, we’ll spend a morning exploring Calgary and a long afternoon and evening in Saskatoon. With the replacement of Calgary by Saskatoon as the point of our road trip’s origination, our road trip will shrink to 873 km, or 542 miles. Here’s the itinerary breakdown. Day 1: Nighttime arrival in Calgary. Day 2: Calgary and Saskatoon. Day 3: Saskatoon to Regina by way of Moose Jaw by car. Day 4: Regina to Winnipeg by way of Brandon and Portage La Prairie by car.

In addition to my posts here, I’ll be tweeting about my Canadian prairie road trip with the hashtag #cdnprairieroadtrip for the next few days. Our road trip will deliver me to Winnipeg, where I’ll spend the following five nights reacquainting myself with the Manitoban metropolis.

Read the entire road trip series here.

Some media support for this road trip was provided by Travel Alberta and Tourism Saskatchewan. All opinions belong to the author.

(Image: Flickr / Space Ritual)