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.

Wheelchair kid stranded by Air Canada after tweet-a-thon

by Tom Johansmeyer on


An eight-year-old kid suffering from muscular dystrophy had a simple dream: to race through Central Park in a tutu surrounded by a group of supporters. After a tweet-a-thon, anchored on the hashtag #TutusForTanner (the kid’s name is Tanner) resulted in $25,000, he hopped a plane for New York. The trip ended with the discovery that his $15,000 wheelchair had been ruined during the flight.

Tanner was stranded. He couldn’t go anywhere without a replacement.

Air Canada promised an immediate remedy – who wouldn’t? – but hours passed and no wheelchair materialized at LaGuardia. And, the airline has said it can’t fix the situation until Monday. Tanner is not in Central Park. Rather, he’s stuck in a hotel bed, possibly for up to five days. Until Air Canada comes through, Tanner isn’t going anywhere.

Also, wheelchairs. But fingers crossed that’s sorted properly. Delirious. Going to curl up & cry, & sleep. Love to you all #tutusfortannerless than a minute ago via TweetDeckCatherine Connors
herbadmother


Needless to say, Twitter is upset – well, specifically the people on Twitter. The folks who tweeted to send Tanner to Manhattan are now livid that Air Canada, according to TechEye.net, “has dashed the hopes of a dying child and ruined what could have been a joyous moment in his last remaining days.”Fortunately, the Twitter-verse seems to be focused on getting a replacement wheelchair for the kid, though it appears that the situation hasn’t been fixed yet. Notes the article, “The #TutusForTanner campaign is still ongoing, growing, and welcoming more support.” Meanwhile, Air Canada still hasn’t done anything, according to the report.

Veils and YouTube trigger Canadian security investigation over passenger identification

by Tom Johansmeyer on


Score one for social media: some guy popped a video of two fully veiled women boarding a plane on YouTube, and now the Canadian authorities are investigating. The video is said to show passengers hopping onto an Air Canada flight to London from Montreal on July 11, 2010. The beef isn’t so much the veils as ensuring “that airline personnel are verifying the identity of all of passengers before they board a flight,” according to the AFP.

In the video, shot by a British traveler, the women were not required to show their faces before boarding, which Canadian Minister of Transportation John Baird called “deeply disturbing” in a statement released Sunday. He added that it “poses a serious threat to the security of the air travelling public.”

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.