Our Journey, Day 72
Preparing for an actual journey
I'll be driving about a thousand miles to get to Edmonton. I'm planning on stopping to walk around every couple of hours, so it will probably take me about seventeen or eighteen hours over a couple of days. I'm going to have a LOT of listening queued up. The audio versions of the two books we'll be covering next in my book club. A bunch of podcasts. That should make the drive enjoyable. And I'm actually looking forward to seeing what this region of North America looks like. I remember when I went on a road trip as a college student, from New England and upstate New York into eastern Canada. There were maps of the bottom of Canada, but they didn't extend too far to the north. Provincial parks like Algonquin and Laurentide were about as far as I got. Edmonton is at about 53.5 degrees north latitude. So it's halfway between where I live and the arctic circle. Not as far north as Iceland, which I visited last spring. But the days will be roughly a half-hour shorter, even this time of year, this close to the equinox.
I don't think I'm going to pass through the "moonscape" of the tar sands region, although I may be wrong. On the map, it looks like the areas currently being worked are mostly north of Edmonton. I will be paralleling the approximate course of the pipeline, although I think I'll be north of it. Tar sands will be close enough, though, and a big enough element of the regional economy that Enbridge is a sponsor of the Open Education event I'll be attending. Also, it's a thousand miles away and it's Canada, so I'll be curious how things are similar to where I live and how they're different. It's also a city of a million people, so nearly two orders of magnitude bigger than my little city of 15,000. If nothing else, I'm looking forward to more diverse restaurants!
I'll admit it's a bit weird, feeling like I'm heading off on this adventure roadtrip. I don't dislike air travel, and I quite enjoyed the flight home from Iceland last spring. It was in the daytime (which was most of the time in early June in the arctic circle!) and I was able to look out the window as we flew over Greenland, and then across the Labrador Sea to extreme northern Canada. Then we flew south over Hudson Bay and across Ontario from north to south, before entering Minnesota from the north. One of the things that always amazes me, for example whenever I get a little bit boastful about how far north I live and how cold it gets, is that there's an entire nation to my north. It's true that 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border (the million people living in Edmonton are an exception). More surprising, 70% live south of the 49th parallel, which is the border from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific. Bemidji is at about 47.5 degrees (same as Seattle), so about two thirds of Canadians live south of me. But even so, the country extends northward to the Arctic Ocean. And when you look at the route I'll be driving in a satellite photo view, most of it seems to be divided up into the same sort of grid you see in the US. Makes me very curious about the history of western land settlement in Canada. Maybe I'll try to visit the Edmondton Historical Society while I'm up there.
In any case, I'm looking forward to the long drive. I'll take pictures along the way, at least when I stop every couple of hours to stretch a bit.