Spring Trip 2010 - Day 32 - Last day in Saskatchewan

This will be the very last entry for this trip ~ at least until such time as my desktop gets dealt with and even then, only if we can retrieve the pictures in it. Seems the problem is more serious than a simple fix.....and was caused by the touchiness of the Vista operating system....now we either have to go back to Windows XP or upgrade to Windows 7....something I just can't afford right now.....

So here we are....May 23rd, the Sunday of the May long weekend...day 32 of this bizarre trip...it had finally quit snowing sometime during the night.

We woke to about a foot and half of the white stuff! Here is the camp chair that we'd sat on, on the Friday, in the sun, reading....

Conservation officers started working their way through the campground, letting everyone know that the good news was that the sun was shining and that they were getting the roads plowed....the bad news was that more snow was on it's way...snow was expected on both Monday and Tuesday. They didn't tell people they should leave while the going was good, but they certainly implied that.

By 10:30 in the morning the mass exodus had begun with neighbours helping neighbours get packed up and out...the road was plowed but the campsites of course, weren't. We were lucky, the snow plow saw we were packing up and plowed into our site as much as he could.

Pretty much ready to pull out...thank goodness for 4 wheel drive...it was fun finding everything under the snow...in fact we missed a dog water bowl...so someone will have found one when (if) the snow ever melted.....

A lot of people were stopped at the park office, I guess trying to get refunds for paid camping fees. Even though we'd paid for another night, we didn't bother, figuring it wasn't the parks fault that they got all this snow....so now we are down on the level, or almost level...there was a truck and travel trailer off the road and against a farm fence in this section....at least they'd stayed upright....

This is the intersection where the park road joined highway 21....this is looking south, we headed north towards Maple Creek

Heading north....

and now here we are in Maple Creek where the only snow is that which is on all the units hightailing it from Cypress Hills! Stopped for fuel and sandwiches from the Subway since it was now lunch time.

Turning west on Highway 1....not a sign of snow anywhere except for those glistening white hills sitting on the horizon....those hills are 'Cypress Hills'....we thanked our lucky stars that we had chosen to go to the Center Block because I suspect anyone who was in the West Block where we had started out, was going to be there for a while!

This Rest area welcomes you to Saskatchewan....we, of course, were leaving.....and on to Medicine Hat in Alberta....

Civilization! and blue skies....stopped at the big Super Store that was one of many many businesses at the edge of town. Replenished supplies, it was sunny and 12 degrees but very very windy. Well we sat in the parking lot the snow continued to melt off the top of our camper creating an embarrassingly large puddle!

The question now was 'Now What?' It was the middle of the May long weekend!!! We decided to head towards Writing on Stone. We knew that it would be hopeless to get in there, but we knew there was a community campground at the visitor's center at Milk River so thought we might be able to get in there, or failing that, just park in the visitor's center parking lot...or, we also knew that most small towns had campgrounds so maybe we'd find something on the way....

as luck would have it ~ that is exactly what happened. We came to a little town (village would be a better description), called 'Grassy Lake' on Highway 3, that had quite a large campground/recreation area. One end of the campground was busy with what looked like a ball tournament going on, but the other end, the serviced end, was empty....so for $15 which included power, we set up and decided to spent the night. This was the scenery looking directly south from the campsite.

So here we are, sunny, 14 degrees, warm enough that all the wet mats, chairs etc. are outside drying and the windows and doors are open to dry everything inside as well. We're still about 100km from our next destination....which was Writing on Stone...and hopefully, with luck (and the computer god's help), we'll get there before too long....