Days 20 & 21 Alaska Trip - Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
We are now 21 days into our journey to Alaska and have been enjoying magnificent weather. After driving only 51 miles from our previous campground, we arrived in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Our water pump stopped working a few days ago so we contacted a mobile repairman to fix it. We waited all afternoon at our campsite, but he never arrived. The water in our motorhome works fine as long as we are connected to the campsite’s water supply. We finally gave up on the repairman and decided to tour Saskatoon today.
Saskatoon Forestry Farm
We started the day by touring the Saskatoon Forestry Farm that houses a wide variety of animals from bears and mountain goats to tiny bald rats and poisonous green and blue frogs.
Prairie Dogs
White wolf
Bald Eagle
Western Development Museum
This museum was a very interesting step into history. Here’s a few of the displays.
The pump truck used by the fire department
From the sign by the exhibit: (replica of a house built in 1904)
On the treeless prairie, thousands of homesteaders built their first homes from the ground beneath their feet - prairie sod.
Sod slab by sod slab, grass side down, walls grew out of the prairie. Once the walls were up, roof rafters were fashioned from poplar or willow poles, then covered with a layer of hay or tar paper and topped off with sod.
Doors and windows were often the only purchased materials in the entire construction.
Inside, bare walls were sometimes wallpapered with newspaper and dirt floors were covered with throw rugs. Packing cases might serve as chairs, linen-closets and china cupboards.
On Sunday night the wash broiler was filled with water and placed on the kitchen stove so that it would heat up first thing Monday morning when the fire was started. Bars of home-made lye soap like these were shaved into the boiler to melt into the water as it was heated on the stove. The soap was made from animal fat and lye, a strong alkali made from wood ash and bones.. A paddle or a stick, often the cut-off handle of an old broom, was used to stir the washing in the boiling-hot water.
Washing usually required a variety of tubs–3 basins and pans such as these. In summer, tubs and basins were set on benches or kitchen chairs in the farm yard. Clothes were scrubbed clean in tubs of warm, sudsy water.
Wet laundry, from fine linens to heavy overalls, was wrung out by hand.
“No Severe Exertion Required.” 1920s advertising for this hand plunger, called a vacuum washer, claimed it could wash anything from horse blankets to the finest laces “without injury in three minutes. Suction forced soapy water through the fabrics.
An earlier version of today’s campers pulled behind cars. This one was used in 1931.
In Canada and the northern United States, mechanics converted Model Ts into snowmobiles for winter travel. Rural delivery services and doctors, in particular, fitted their Model Ts with skis to cover their large territories.
Doctors had to travel far and wide no matter the weather. In 1927, Dr. Johns asked the mechanic at Block’s Garage in Viscount to convert this Model T for winter travel. On his way to deliver a baby near Plunkett, Dr. Johns’s snowmobile ran out of engine oil so he topped it up with water. He got there in time but his snowmobile was ruined.
Straw gas powered car
Now that electric cars are increasing in popularity, here’s one that was developed in 1982. The ElecTrek was marketed as an environmentally friendly option because of its ability to recharge almost anywhere and to run without petroleum fuels. However, the cost of batteries and the electricity to charge them came to 10.79 cents per km at a time when the average gas car cost 5.2 cents per km to operate.
A nice painting on the side of a building in downtown Saskatoon
Here is the map of our trip to this point
Site 46 at the Gordie Howe Campground
TRIP STATISTICS:
- Miles driven in the RV yesterday :51
- Miles driven in the car 36
- Total miles driven in car and RV: 3,135
- Gordie Howe Campground $37.50 per night. The average cost has been 36.22 per night
- Groceries and food: $522.03 for an average of $24.86 per day
- Last gas cost $3.978 a gallon . Our total is now $1,198.48 which has averaged $57.07 per day