Frozen Prairies

“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

-John Krakauer, Into the Wild

After spending a splendid week-end in the frigid city of Calgary, I set out on foot to continue my journey to the East. After finding a way out of the city (this is the hardest part of hitch hiking, the one that dosen’t involve actual hitch hiking!). When I reached the trans-canada highway #1 I started walking along the road to find a suitable place to hitch. I finally found a spot and I stood there in the chilling wind for almost two hours. Finally a gentleman picked me up and gave me a ride about 40 minutes down the road till the town of Bassano.
The dryness and windiness of the region makes for a very cold experience. Happily, I had come prepared from Mexico. In fact most of the items I packed with me were related to cold weather.

Trying to get to Regina

After approximately one hour of waiting an older lady, ex-hitch hiker herself, picked me up. She lived in Medicine Hat and had to go to a doctor’s appointment once a month, and today happened to be that day. Incidentally, instead of her appointment lasting 2 hours, it lasted only 15 minutes (for which she was quite pissed but for which I profitted). As one travels hitch hiking, one begins to see how life is made up of many small coincidences. Call it providence, luck or destiny, the thing is that quite frenquently in my trip I became aware of these small coincidences and how without them my day might have been very different (although it is not possible to know how things might turn out otherwise). So she drove me to the entrance of Medicine Hat. Here I waited another hour before a friendly young guy who loved travelling offered to bring me across to the other side of town. He bought me a cup of coffee and we parted. It was already 4.30 pm and I had only under 300km tallied for the day, far from my goal of 757km to reach Regina, SK.

About an hour later (you can see now that my average for Alberta is about an hour) a man picked me up. His name was Albert. Albert from Newfoundland. Newfies are notorious for their accents, and I now understood why. This man worked in Medicine Hat, but lived over an hour away in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. Unfortunately Maple Creek is quite a small town, and in fact on the highway it is nothing more than an intersection with a small gas station and a motel across the road, and the sun was going down, as well as the temperature. And even though I travel this way for the love of it, I also happened to have very little money so spending it on a motel was out of the question. So I only had the prospect of either a cold night out in the prairies or a miracle ride.

The flat prairies

Hitch hiking the prairies

At approximately 7.15pm (on my whole trip I was always confused as to the actual time since I went through 4 time zones and since Saskatchewan is ont on daylight savings time, it was actually like 5) a man stopped and picked me up. And here is the coincidence of the day: this guy told me he saw me in Calgary around 1pm (but obviously didn’t stop to pick me up). He worked 21 days on, and one week off, today was his last day and he was on his way home to Regina (who gets off work on a monday?). So he didn’t stop in Calgary, but his car broke down in Medicine Hat where he had to stop and fix it. In the meantime I had passed him, and now he saw me again in Maple Creek and decided to give me a ride. I dind’t actually tell him, but I was quite glad his car broke down in Medicine Hat, otherwise I might have had a very cold night ahead of me. This just shows that one can never know what is ahead. Sometimes hitch hiking can feel quite long and boring, and one might be tempted to give up. But as long as there is light (generally), your luck can change in any instant. It is an excersice in patience and in one’s ability to keep his spirits up. So in the end I reached my goal which was Regina. I even drove for a couple of hours while my host slept and rested from his day’s work.

Sunset in the cold prairies

We arrived in Regina at around 11pm, and he kindly drove me downtown to the Salvation Army refuge. So not only I rode 340km with him, but he also found me a warm place to sleep for free.
I entered the refuge with my backpack and my cardboard signs in my hand. I registered at the counter, my backpack was stowed away in a safe place, I was shown my bed and given blankets. Breakfast at 8, I was told. I brushed my teeth, wrote down my day’s progress and went to sleep. When I started my day in the morning I wasn’t sure what to expect. It had been quite a day, with an unexpected twist at the end. Good stories have plot twists at the end I thought, I guess good days are like that too. Nevertheless the next day’s plot twists still caught me by surprise, despair, hope and rescue all in one day. But that story I will tell later!

At the Salvation Army refuge in Regina.

[I want to thank all the people who contributed to this trip, especially the Riloba family in Calgary as well as all the great people I met and who lended a helping hand to a travelling stranger! They make this world a better place.]