Mom in the Mtns

Hi everyone!  It’s been another super long day of travel – the longest one on our trip!  When we woke up in North Dakota I had no idea what to expect since we’d spent the last 5 hours of day 2 driving in the dark.  Well it turns out that North Dakota (as well as Saskatchewan!) is prairie!  Everything we saw was either flat or tiny rolling hills, and it was all yellow.  There was barely anything green all day!  I’ve never seen anything like it before so I actually really enjoyed the views.  It’s something I might not ever see again!

Confession time:  I really had no idea what “rural” meant until we drove on the prairie.  I’ve been to some pretty remote places before, but nothing like what I saw today!  There were so many areas where you couldn’t see anything for miles and then you’d see one little farm way out there and it just kind of blew my mind that someone could live so far away from other people!  I think I’m too social to be able to do that   🙂  Also, this made for some interesting moments where I needed to use the bathroom and couldn’t find one for a while!  And it’s not like you can pull over and do it real quick, there are no trees!  We quickly learned to go to the bathroom and get gas for our car whenever the opportunity came up!  We did drive through 3 cities today, but most of it was wide open prairie.  Tomorrow we are supposedly going to drive through the Canadian Rockies which is really exciting!!!!  As interesting as this new landscape was, I am really excited to finally get to some big mountains!

It’s too late for me to dig around in my car for my phone cord so I can upload all my pictures, and this hotel won’t let me get wifi to work on my phone, so that is the only picture I can show you today since I uploaded it to Facebook back in the US!  I’ll have to upload the rest tomorrow when I figure out how to get around using any phone data in Canada.  Super short post since not much happened today, but along with the official details over on Bearly Alaskan here’s what went on today:

Cups of coffee:  3 again.  Which was more terrifying today because bathrooms were very limited out there!

Number of naps:  4, and each time I woke up the scenery looked the same so I didn’t feel so bad about sleeping through it.

Scariest moment:  Going through the Canadian border crossing!  I was terrified that we were going to get denied for some reason.  It didn’t help that the first question we were asked was “What is your plate number” and we both totally froze and forgot it!  We did get asked to come in to the immigration office for a little questioning by an officer but after he determined that we weren’t lying about anything we were on our way.  I think they asked us in there because there was literally nothing else for them to be doing.  It was such a small crossing and there was only 1 other car there!

Most embarrassing moment:  Having no idea why the speed limit was so high.  FYI:  that 100 means 100 km per hour, not miles.  Also, gas was so “cheap” because it’s in liters, not gallons.

Best food:  Tim Horton’s iced coffee!  It tastes just like Dunkin Donuts!

Hopefully I’ll be able to do a massive photo upload tomorrow!  In the mean time, google image search “Saskatchewan” for views from today’s trip!  And we are looking forward to only driving 10 hours tomorrow, that might mean that I can have time to go running tomorrow and won’t be so sleep deprived?  I can only hope!

Have you ever been to the prairie?  Have you ever been to Canada and had trouble using the metric system?