Day 16: Riding Mountain National Park, MB to Regina, SK (August 19, 2017)
Friday August 25, 2017 (Canada)
Heavy driving day today! This wasn't made easier by the fact that I missed a turn on the navigation side of things which ended up sending us into Yorkton, Saskatchewan. It was a happy accident, though, because Sandra's friend Suzanne had lived there several years ago so we had the opportunity to check out the town a little bit!
Rewinding to a time before my critical navigational error, we stopped by Inglis, Manitoba to check out a row of historic grain elevators. The site houses five grain elevators, one of which is doubled. They were all built in the 1920s except for the larger of the doubled elevators, which was constructed the early 1940s. The prairies used to be littered with thousands of examples of wooden grain elevators, but Inglis is now one of very few remaining rows of them. You can still spot many individual elevators across the prairies, but not in large groupings any more. They're in the process of being restored, and tours take place within one of the elevators. They all look very similar because they were constructed to railroad specifications referred to as the "standard plan". You can read about the development of the grain elevator here if you're interested.
From Inglis we passed (inadvertently) into Yorkton, SK. We spotted a CAA location and decided to go in to see if we could get breakdown coverage for the remainder of our trip. We'd been talking about how that would add some nice peace of mind. Turns out there are two issues preventing this from happening:
- You have to purchase a CAA membership from within your province of residence. We are homeless. Strike one.
- CAA memberships aren't completely effective until a week after you purchase them, which eats up a bunch of the remaining time on the trip for which we wanted it! They'll still tow you, but you have to pay a hefty surcharge which would basically equal the price of a tow.
All of this is to say that we walked out of there without CAA coverage. Note to future travellers: if you want CAA coverage for your road trip, get it well before you leave!
Our path then took us through the Qu'Appelle Valley, which is a very pleasant river valley in Saskatchewan that contains more elevation change than you might think Saskatchewan has to offer! The views were actually quite impressive as we descended into the valley itself to the quaint town within.
We continued onward to Regina, where we arrived just in time for dinner. We ate at the Bushwakker Brewpub (meh), and followed up with ice cream dessert at a Regina institution by the name of Milky Way. There were big crowds waiting to get a lick, but we stuck around and managed to secure ourselves some tasty treats to send us off to bed. We didn't plan on spending too much time in Regina (although the city is actually quite beautiful!) – it's off to Grasslands National Park in the morning!