![\"d20110926_0003\"](\"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/d20110926_0003.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI’ve only ever been this way once before, when my mother went to see some sort of motivational speaker in Dauphin and I went along for the ride.\u00a0 I don’t remember much about Dauphin at all, and I elected to bypass it this trip.<\/p>\n
Next stop to the west was Roblin, which we went to several times while we lived at the farm.\u00a0 I don’t recall why we went there though.\u00a0 There was a playground I liked that had one of those fat, short, shiny slides – it got scalding hot in summer.\u00a0 And this building:<\/p>\n
used to have an arcade in the basement.\u00a0 It’s the only place I have ever seen a Black Widow<\/a> machine – that game was really hard to play.\u00a0 This is also either where I first played Stargate<\/a>, or where I most played it.\u00a0 Mastering those space cadet controls was half the challenge.<\/p>\n On one of our trips to Roblin, I discovered a hard lump on my elbow.\u00a0 We went to a local doctorb to have it looked at.\u00a0 She said it was just a skin cyst and would grow out in a couple of years.\u00a0 Well, here I am more than twenty years later and it’s still there, unchanged.\u00a0 That’s how I know it’s a Thought Police tracking device. :)<\/p>\n Moving on from Roblin, I stopped for lunch in Yorkton, then got on to what we called “the back way”, which was the most direct route between our farm and Calgary – mostly consisting of highway 15.\u00a0 It cuts straight across Saskatchewan, passing between Regina and Saskatoon.\u00a0 We liked this route because it was more direct, and had much less traffic than the more standard Trans-Canada or Yellowhead Highway routes.\u00a0 I wanted to revisit it at least partway for old time’s sake.<\/p>\n Well, it never was a terribly great road but now it’s in awful shape.\u00a0 Some sections have nasty pothole problems and sags from heavy grain trucks and farm equipment abusing it, and some parts have even been replaced with gravel – an improvement over the state of the adjoining paved sections.<\/p>\n One thing I remember about this route now – it seemed interminable.\u00a0 That is still true.\u00a0 The road is very straight and very flat.\u00a0 It mostly looks like this:<\/p>\n My destination for today was Saskatoon but I took a slight detour to visit the town of Outlook, because I wanted to rephotograph two landmarks there.<\/p>\n The first was a roadside\u2026 thingy\u2026 called Boot Hill – basically a fence with dozens of different kinds of boots nailed to it.\u00a0 I didn’t find it today, but perhaps I didn’t go quite far enough.\u00a0 Not a big deal.<\/p>\n The second was the impressive train bridge over the river valley near the town:<\/p>\n The train tracks have been removed and it’s now the longest foot bridge in Canada – more than three quarters of a mile long.\u00a0 I think it might be part of the Trans-Canada Trail now.<\/p>\n Here’s the view from the town end:<\/p>\n And looking south from the middle of the bridge, towards where I took the first picture:<\/p>\n After that, I just continued on to Saskatoon and got my room for the night.<\/p>\n Here are a couple more prairie ruins for you:<\/p>\n [gmap file=”__UPLOAD__\/2011\/09\/20110926.kml” visible=”true” type=”satellite” zoom=”auto” center=”files”]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 2011\/09\/26 Wow, this was a long day.\u00a0 I was behind the wheel for nine hours today – by far the longest day on this trip in terms of driving time.\u00a0 Do not want to do that again. Left Wasagaming via the north exit from Riding Mountain park – here’s the view to the north. I’ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-sightseeing","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n