Mother Nature’s a Little Pissed Off

I’ve been away for a bit doing another crazy cross Canada/US adventure–hence my neglected blog. Sorry about that.

You may recall last year’s adventure where I was wondering if there were any roads left in Southern Saskatchewan. (And there sort of were.) This year has been another banner year for floods. And to think two years ago I was contemplating planting cactus in the front yard it was so dry… Here on the Canadian prairies we’ve had towns burn to the ground (Slave Lake) followed by being flooded out (again, Slave Lake). Even our town had flooding (twice) with manhole covers shooting up three feet in the air from the intense rainfall trying to gush its way to our “lake” (really just a smelly pond we like to imagine is a real, honest-to-goodness lake). (Thank goodness we live on a hill!)

This year, like most, we jammed ourselves in our vehicle and traveled across a couple of provinces (and American states), camping our way along and pounding down some of those same roads as last year. To my surprise, they were still working on the stretch of the Trans Canada in Southern Saskatchewan where the Eastbound double lane was completely washed out. I had assumed that, one year later, everything would be tickety-boo and good to go again. Evidently not quite.

Here’s a little of what I saw:

This is the Eastbound lane–that packed dirt that drops off into the gulch. (The white truck is a construction vehicle, not someone about to do some serious 4x4ing.)

While this bit of Saskatchewan road was passable, there were some stretches in the southern part of the province that got the hack this year from new floods–involving a bit of a detour for us. (Those were the floods from Weyburn and area that stretched down to Minot, North Dakota. Man, is Minot ever hurting. Don’t try going camping there.) It is amazing what a few days of way too much water can do to a place. And yet… on the other side of the world people are starving due to drought.

I think Mother Nature might be a little P.O.ed at us…