Day 75 - Gordie Howe Campground?

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Day 75 – August 4

Gordon Howe Campground, Saskatoon, SK.

Our random spurts of spontaneity really made for a serious situation that ended up being an amazing experience. I’ll explain in a minute.

We packed up the car on the morning of Saturday, July 21, and headed east. Our plan all along was to visit a high school friend in Fernie BC but did not hear back from her soon enough because she was out of town, so we made a drastic change of plans.

The plan all along was to skip out on Edmonton. Not much farming, stories of less-than-interesting vacations or the actual geographic location of the city were all reasons we’d never really considered going. For some reason we felt no need to head directly east with all of this free time and no real place lined up to stay, so we set the GPS for Edmonton and eventually stumbled into Kooteney National Park which spills directly into Banff National Park and Canmore. We were so hungry and had managed to buy our groceries in Radium Springs to make sure we could set up and eat when we got to wherever we thought we were going. Eventually we took out the map and realized we need to do the roughly two hour drive to make it out of the National Parks where we’d need to buy a $20 day pass and then $30 or so for camping. Already going through Banff on the way out west we knew the first “mini-Banff” before you hit Banff from the east is Canmore where we had already couch surfed with Hannah. It was approaching 10pm so too late notice to call her so we did a quick search of the campgrounds and found that they were all full. Instead of planning for a place to stay we realized we needed to eat so we set up the coleman stove and all of the cooking gear on a round picnic table at McDonald’s directly beside the drive-thru. It wasn’t invasive; we weren’t being loud or interrupting anyone’s meal in the dark lawn of grass. Just the looks from people seeing us grill up a stir fry which contained orange pepper, mushrooms and tomatoes with a side of German schnitzel was enough to keep us motivated. The footage of our good old fashion civil disobedience was also going to be gold.

After the feast we were pretty tired. Justin literally ran into the only clump of about 30 trees surrounding the bright golden arch which shows travellers on the surrounding highway where the “food” is. He concluded we could set up our large blue tarp and began setting up a makeshift camp spot similar to the one we prepared on Anderson Lake, BC (a previous post, early July maybe?). To make sure there were no hard feelings we jumped in the car and did the drive-thru to grab a couple late night pies to celebrate our free camping / sticking it to the man (or something like that).

There’s a great video in the morning where it’s panning over the smaller black tarp sprawled under our air mattresses, onto Justin looking through his bag then walking around a the few trees separating us from the vehicles waiting for a quick breakfast. Right away someone is looking at me and I can’t help but laugh as I turn around and begin to pack up. We had driven way long than anticipated the night before due to our sudden change of plans and were less than two hours from our destination for the day/night of Sunday, July 31.

I had written about our good friends from couch surfing in Calgary in the same post that summarized the events probably up to Whistler or so I imagine. It’s difficult to keep your promises of stopping by on your way back east but Adrienne told us we were going to raft along the main river through the city and couldn’t resist. Literally hundreds if not thousands of rafts can be seen floating down this river on a hot day. Since it was such an easy camp site to disassemble combined with the short drive from Canmore we had a full day of exploring before meeting Adrienne and Alexis for a fundraiser for her sister’s trip to teach orphans in Guatemala. Entertainment isn’t generally free in big cities so we didn’t have many options.

We parked and walked to the base of the Calgary Tower, drove to the zoo to see how much admission was, then ultimately ended up reading our books under a tree in a park beside the large river we would be rafting on the 24 hours from then. Conveniently, Cowboys and Aliens was playing at 4:20pm in the theatre downtown so we managed to get up from under the tree in time to catch that.

Around 7 or so the GPS was set for one of the hundreds of suburbs scattered around the city. The fundraiser was a barbeque so we donated some money and ate burgers and vegetables that were waiting for us. Though it was a Sunday night it was definitely a party atmosphere and as well as a blast.
Ran out of time and battery.

Will finish part 2 today in the car..

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