My ain’t that purty?

We’re settling into site 43 in Dogpatch section of Sask. Landing Provincial park.  I don’t think it’s actually called Dogpatch section but it’s some other stupid name like that.  It was a little challenging getting into the site but we made it and we got Clifford’s awning rolled out so I can sit under it with a cold beer.  SWMBO is doing her favorite camping thing – making a great big fire. 

It’s hard to believe that this campground is pretty well smack dab in the middle of the famous Palliser Triangle.  Somebody planted a lot of PFRA trees down here in the river bottom many years ago.  You can see the bald prairie hills around the edge of the campground but it’s pretty pleasant in the shelter of the trees.  I guess the “lake” outside the campground is what’s left of the south Saskatchewan river backed up behind Gardiner Dam which is probably 90 miles away from here. 

We left Buchanan about a week ago, stopped close to Weldon for a few nights, moved out west of Saskatoon for a couple more nights and spent the last two nights south of Biggar.  I’m on my annual Saskatchewan circuit looking at farmland and interviewing tenants for Assiniboia Capital/Palliser Farmland.  They’re an investment group that buys farmland and packages it for investors who don’t want to mess with the dirty business of holding the physical farmland.  Along the way we’ve been mooching parking spaces from friends with large yards, always being careful to move on before they ask us to so that we can come back next year.

We’ll likely spend at least another week on my round the province road trip and then end up in Nipawin.  I’ve got a few thousand dollars worth of brake parts stored in Ozmun’s shop.  I asked him today if he had sold them yet but apparently he hasn’t had any takers so I’ll likely get to hang them on the bus after all.  I bought them last year thinking that I would need to redo the brakes on the drive axle when we did the brakes on the tags but it turned out that the drives were actually still in really good shape.  Darrel said he could store the parts for as long as I wanted so we ground another year’s wear out of the drive brakes and now we’ll have new brakes pretty well all around.  The fronts were in like new condition last year.  My rebuild on the tag axle is still hanging in there but I’m paranoid about it so we stop way too often to check it. 

Harvest is just getting rolling in Saskatchewan.  Marlan and Michael crossed back into Canada earlier this week so that must mean that things are ready to roll in southern Alberta too.  RJ has already posted harvest pictures on his Facebook page so they have started.  There’s not a lot of combines rolling  yet in eastern or northern Sask. but there’s lots of swathing going on and it’s not unusual to see a combine going either.  All that means that fall isn’t far away – we haven’t seen any flocks of geese yet but I suppose it won’t be long before we do.