Retroblogging the megatrip: part 4a

I'm just going to do a massive photo dump for this part of the next leg. I was looking through the pictures and notice the disparity between the quantity of good pictures and the number of things that we did over the first day post-Winnipeg. Why? Because the day looked like this:

Then like this:

Yep, it pretty much rained for the whole day. Whatever, we were on the road and we were going to embrace it. We were due for a rainy drive at some point anyway. This drive leading out of Winnipeg was very sentimental for Holly and I. 15 years prior, we hopped into our LeBaron convertible and set off for Vancouver to start our co-habitating life together. A lot of what was to come over the following days of our family road trip would retrace the steps we took on our maiden voyage as a couple and introduce our boys to some big moments from our past. In fact, we decided that the first stop would be in Souris (pronounced soo-riss), MB, which is the home of Canada's longest historic suspension bridge. We thought the kids would get a kick out of being on a gigantic footbridge. However, by the time we rolled up to Souris, the rain had been coming down for a while and so our packed picnic lunch became an inside-the-van affair. Then we threw our coats on and crossed the bouncy, slightly slippery span. It wasn't the same bridge Holly and I saw in '99 - an ice floe apparently threatened to rip the bridge and its moorings from the riverbank so the city decided to dismantle the bridge. It was rebuilt last year to the tune of $4.5M and was looking pretty new for us. Here are some pictures of us in Souris.

We have a picture of Holly at this same historical plaque on the way through in 1999.

After tackling the bridge, we thought we'd spent some time at the rock quarry digging for treasures (something Max and Leo would both love). While in Winnipeg, we had read an article in the Free Press about the owner of the Souris Rock Shop and some of his specimens (Thanks Grandma for saving that clipping!). He was tending the store when we arrived, waiting for a school bus from out of town to arrive for a little taste of geology. He said that unfortunately, the quarry was probably filled with enough water to go up to Max's waist and that we wouldn't be able to go. However, he did take us into the back of his shop to show us some of his neat rocks (including a fossilized mammoth's tooth, pictured below). It's really too bad we couldn't check out the quarry. Apparently, Souris is located right where a number of glaciers stopped moving, bringing rocks from far away in different directions. Today, it's a big destination for rock hounds, who can find a wide variety of stones in the ground. The boys picked out a few rocks to bring to Grand Forks for Grandpa, the rock hound in our family. Hopefully it will be drier next time we are in Winnipeg and we can make a day trip out of it!

Then, something happened that I'm not very proud about but I think is hilarious. The kids all nodded off shortly after leaving the Rock Shop and we BOMBED across eastern Saskatchewan. We actually made really awesome time and decided that we would try to press on as much as we could that day in order to make the next day a little bit shorter on the road. Plus, it's not like we were going to do a bunch of outdoorsy things on a rainy day, right? We pulled into Regina at about dinner time and discovered that someone in the back seats had a wet accident. I will protect the guilty by not naming names, but I will mention "back seat" so that nobody thinks that either Holly or I is incontinent. This started the most awesome triple shot of commercial establishment visits of all time. 1) We hit up a Wal-Mart for some upholstery cleaner. Check. 2) We needed to feed the kids and ourselves AND we wanted to figure out a way to let the kids burn off some steam after having been cooped up in the van all day. So Holly had the disturbrillianting idea to hit up Costco for a super cheap and fast dinner before heading to 3) Chuck E. Cheese for a few hours of blowing brains out playing games and earning tickets. Total cost of dinner: $10. For all of us. Picnic leftovers helped round things out I guess. To round out the budget absurdity of the evening, Holly found a Chuck E. Cheese coupon online as well. And then, off to the races:

The above picture is of Chuck, the mascot, coming into the restaurant (he apparently does this every hour) to lead the kids in a frantic round of "Head and Shoulders" before tossing tickets into the air and essentially turning the foyer into Black Friday at Best Buy. Kids cried every time. Imagine that, too much mayhem for kids.

The boys had an absolute blast at their first-ever Chuck E. Cheese visit. It was the perfect treat for them. After the brouhaha of redeeming all the Chuck E. Cheese tickets (Henry got a soft C.E.C. soccer ball, Max got a rope-cutting magic trick and Leo got a game of pick-up-sticks with their tickets), we settled in for another couple of hours on the road. The kids were into it, because this meant iPad cartoons. It was a bit of a bummer to have started the drive west of Regina at night because that is, hands down, the prettiest part of the province (short of the Qu'Appelle valley). At least we got to see some the following day. In the end, we drove something like 10 hours that day and cleared another 815 km. Not quite as impressive as our last full day in the Midwest, but pretty solid nonetheless. We pulled in at our hotel in Swift Current, cleaned some upholstery, washed the dishes, did some laundry and passed out.

Max was too tired to care that he scored a spot on the floor for the night.

At dusk, we thought that the rain had started again after a dry spell. Wrong. It turns out that the bugs hit the sky right around then and there were so many that it sounded like drops of rain. We took a few out. The same thing seems to happen in Washington State.
The first part of the next day wasn't very eventful. We drove until we hit a rest stop just before the border so that Holly could get her picture taken with some historic plaques (Holly used to have a thing for getting her picture taken with as many as possible on road trips) and so that we could kick a soccer ball and toss a frisbee with the kids. Then we found cacti on the ground where we were playing. Then Leo wanted to say "hi" to passing motorists and almost walked onto the Trans-Canada (we were NOT close to him when this happened). Then it was time to go. We got to the Alberta border right around lunchtime and snapped a couple of pictures with the kids. And then Max got The Sliver. There was a fantastic wooden play structure at the Alberta visitor's centre (not quite like this, but also not quite like this. Something in between). Max was playing and got A Sliver. The ensuing 30 minutes were filled with a lot of melodrama. I think the best was when I was working on his finger with a safety pin and he decided to twitch…into the safety pin. Max doesn't like blood. Awesome. Eventually, we poured him into the car and decided to leave the small piece we couldn't get in his finger because he simply was not going to let us near him again. As it turns out, all of that weeping and wailing wore him (and everyone else) out, so I was the sole conscious person in the van as we passed through Medicine Hat and Brooks. Then we veered off the highway toward Drumheller…which I will save for the next instalment. In the meantime, here are some pictures from the first part of day 11.