Saskatoon, SK - Kenora, ON (via Winnipeg, MB)
We rolled out of Saskatoon a little late . . . around 9am. The (lofty) goal for the day would be Thunder Bay, Ontario.
The driving crew consisted of my boss and his son Brian in an old (27 years?) Dodge truck and myself and Bryce in a 1991 Toyota Corolla. Both have manual transmissions. The truck used to have its gear shift on the steering column, but had been altered after numerous problems; the gear shift had been ripped out of the steering column and attached to the gear through a hole in the floor, giving a rough approximation of where a gear shift usually goes on a standard. Since Bryce had just learned to drive stick in the last week or so, I took the first shift (ha ha) so he wouldn't have to deal with any city driving, and we both avoided driving the truck on account of its peculiar setup.
The Moosomin 500 of the previous weekend was good practice for the early stage of the drive (in fact, we took the same route through Moosomin to get to Manitoba). It is flat leaving Saskatoon, then it gets to very gently sloped prairie as you go South a bit. But it's more or less flat all the way to Winnipeg.
Winnipeg was the biggest city by far that we would hit on this first day. But as it has a road all the way around it, we didn't see too much. Just as the perimeter road joins up with the Trans-Canada highway on the East side, there's a truck stop named Salisbury House where we stopped for supper.
The Salisbury House features pretty common truck stop/roadside diner fare. Imagine one of those big, laminated menus, with all-day breakfast and such. Except everywhere that you would see the word "burger", substitute the word "Nip". As in, "Our Famous Nips" and "Chili Cheese Nip" and the formidable "Mr. Big Nip" which had three or four patties. This was a little bewildering to us . . . for some reason I think Evan might have told me about this, but I'm not sure. Anyway, Brian (who happens to be half-Japanese) insisted that we call him Mr. Big Nip for the remainder of the trip.
You hit the Canadian Shield pretty soon after heading East out of Winnipeg. The terrain shift would be the last for quite a while. Basically lots of trees, rocks and hills.
Due to our late start, we only made it to Kenora by about midnight. The other tricky thing is that we'd crossed into another time zone, making it a loss of two hours. We stopped for the night at a little motel that provided small, clean rooms where you get your own mini-fridge.
Posted by warcode at July 06, 2003 11:23 PM