My operating company, Mac Plastics, has a subcontract to supply and install seven moderately large skylights on a school in Estevan, Saskatchewan. I am sitting in a hotel room in Estevan as I write this. The roofing contractor that we are working with has had the curbs prepared on site for some time now. Partially I have procrastinated a little, but mostly the weather has not been great. Finally it is time to deal with this once and for all so I drove down to the job site for some meetings with the roofer and with the consultant, as well as to confirm site dimensions.
I left Edmonton first thing in the morning on Tuesday. The temperatures were pretty mild, and driving conditions were reasonable. I headed east to Lloydminster and on through North Battleford and into Saskatoon. There were a few icy sections around Vermilion, and east of North Battleford but for the most part the roads were pretty good. I made a brief stop for fuel in Saskatoon and continued on to Regina. When I arrived there I made a point of visiting the Art Gallery of Regina where my friend Rob Michiel and I will hang our Procession West exhibition in the summer of 2013.
Unfortunately the curator was not available to meet with me, but I got a good look at the available space, and got some dimensions of the room. This helps a lot as Rob and I work towards finalizing our image selection.
The gallery space was larger than I imagined with a very high ceiling. There appears to be some good lighting that can be positioned onto the work. I am a little concerned that our prints will look very small in this large space and that we will need to be sure to have enough of them. Rob and I will get together when I return home and review the photos that I took and the measurements that I took and make certain that we fill up this large space with an adequate number of prints.
I didn't reserve a room in Regina, thinking that on a weekday evening in the middle of the winter it would not be a problem. Much to my dismay I quickly learned that there appears to be a shortage of hotel rooms in Regina, and everything was full. I drove around to a number of hotels and motels and every one of them was fully booked. Whatever happened to the old days when everyone had a No Vacancy sign. Nowadays there is no such thing and you have to actually go in and ask at the reception desk if anything is available. Eventually a found a "less than ideal" room in a run down old motel on the edge of downtown. It was very affordable, but not very inviting. I'm not sure why the desk clerk bothered to ask if I wanted a non-smoking room? As soon as I opened the door I was hit with the strong smell of stale tobacco smoke. It smelled as if someone had just finished puffing on a big old Cuban cigar and jumped out the back window as I came in the front. The walls were all beat up and patched, it was not overly clean, and the mattress felt like a truck had been parked on it for about a month. I didn't feel very comfortable leaving all my gear there and trying to find someplace to eat so I just stayed in the room and had a pizza delivered. The only good thing about the place was that they had lots of water pressure and lots of hot water, so my morning shower the next day was really good.
After my shower I hit the road on Wednesday morning and headed southeast for Estevan. It was overcast and very dull and there was a stiff breeze blowing out of the east. With the wind chill factor taken into account if felt a lot colder than what the thermometer in my truck read [-5C].
I arrived in Estevan at about 11:30, just ahead of schedule, and headed over to the High School. I met with the roofing contractor and discussed the upcoming skylight installation. I was able to take site dimensions of all of the roof curbs that have been prepared for the new skylights. I will use this information when I return to the office to lay out the fabrication drawings for the skylights, order the necessary glass sealed units, and prefabricate the frames. In three or four weeks, when everything is ready and weather conditions are reasonable, my crew will return to the site to undertake the installation. In all likelihood I will not return with them, but that remains to be seen. I waited around for a while until the consultant arrived from Regina and then met with him to discuss the time lines and progression of work. Once that was done I scouted around a little to find a transport company that can transport our materials, a crane company that can hoist them, and some accommodations that we can book for our crew.
I knew that Estevan was busy with oil patch activity so I had the foresight to book a room for myself in advance of my trip. As I sit here tonight in my room, watching the Oilers game on TV, I feel a lot more relaxed and comfortable than I did last night. This place is clean, bright and comfortable and nothing like the place I was forced to stay in last night.
There is a nice restaurant right here in the hotel and I just had dinner there. It seems to be an attempt on the part of the restaurant operator to bring some fine cuisine to the frontier town that is Estevan. With the recent development of the Bakken oilfield here in this area, this has become very much an oil patch town. Nothing but drilling companies, service companies, welding shops, oilfield transport companies, etc. If very much has the feel of Alberta oilpatch towns like Nisku, Drayton Valley, Rocky Mountain House and Swan Hills. The restaurant has an executive chef that is attempting to put together some gourmet meals with a little originality. I had tenderloin with some grilled vegetables, sauteed mushrooms, baked potato and a nice Caesar salad. The salad was quite original, and very good. It consisted of a bunch of romaine leaves tucked into a donut shaped ring of nan bread along with a slice of bacon. It was cold and crisp and served with a homemade dressing that had just the right hint of anchovy, and some black olives and a slice of lemon on the side. I quite liked it. The only part of my meal that seemed a little unfitting the image they were attempting to portray was that the sour cream and the green onions for my baked potato we prepared in advance and served in little plastic dixie cups with little plastic lids. That part didn't quite fit...
I couldn't help but chuckle to myself as I enjoyed my evening meal. It was certainly a lot more enjoyable than the pizza I had delivered to my room in Regina the night before. Dining alone meant that there was no dinner conversation and there was nothing to do but watch what was going on. This certainly is a frontier town and most of the clientele were working guys, mostly wearing jeans and ball caps. There were several other middle aged men dining alone, just like me. There were a couple of younger guys sitting at a table beside me and couldn't help but overhear their conversation, in particular due to the lack of conversation at my table...
They were discussing their work and from what they were talking about it was obvious that they were welders. One of the guys wanted to order a bottle of wine but the other would have no part of that, so they settled for beer. The younger of the two guys attempted to order a steak, and there were three on the menu. One was a sirloin, the second a tenderloin, which I ordered, and the third a larger rib steak. I overheard him ask the waitress if they had a good steak like a New York. She replied that the sirloin was almost an identical cut to a New York, or they had a slightly larger Tenderloin. I almost burst out laughing when he asked her if that was a good cut, and if is was almost as good as the sirloin. One of the two ordered the Caesar salad that I had. When it arrived I overheard him complaining, asking what the **ck kind of Caesar salad it was and later commenting that it wasn't very good. I guess you can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy...
With my work obligations wrapped up I will relax this evening and then hit the road for home in the morning. I will leave Estevan in the morning and slowly make my way back home. I've brought my large format camera with me and hopefully I can find some photo opportunities along the way home. There is still time to consider any new "Prairie Winter" images that might be worthy of the Procession West show. I plan on travelling across southern Saskatchewan, generally paralleling the US border. Eventually I will turn north up into Alberta and eventually end up back home sometime on Friday evening.
When I do get back home I will post a few snapshots from this trip but for the time being I have no way of downloading the images from my camera and re-sizing them for inclusion here.
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