Pontiac

Last spring I went out on a day trip with my brother-in-law Shawn.  Sadly he is not in good health, less than a year later.  He is in the Mazankowski Heart Institute in Edmonton, awaiting surgery to implant an artificial heart.  Wishing him all the best, as I reminisce about our outing 11 months ago.

We went out exploring to the northeast of Edmonton.  Shawn had never gone on a photo day trip with me before, so this was a first for him.  He was plunking around with a digital camera that he had recently started using.

We found this old Pontiac, overgrown in the bush at the edge of a farmers field.  Obviously it had been there for quite some time.  I'm not sure of the vintage of this one.... 1970's I would guess....?

This shot was taken on a sheet of Kodak High Speed Infrared film.  Kodak stopped manufacturing this film in the late 1990s.  I still have several boxes of 4"x5" left in my freezer and have been slowly trying to use it up.  This particular sheet hit its best before date in August of 2001.  I loaded it into a film holder on May 25th last year, and exposed it the next day.  After exposure I unloaded the holder and stored the exposed sheet in my fridge until I developed it on March 20th this year.  I find that now that this film is getting really old, I only get reasonable results if I don't let it lay around too long at room temperature or warmer.  So I will make a point of making the best use that I can of the stock that I have left.  Development was in Kodak T-Max Developer, 1:6, for 6:45 minutes at 24C.

I shot this image on May 26th 2025, at about 2:00 in the afternoon.  I used my Ebony SV45TU view camera and a wide 110mm lens.  A #25 Red filter blocked much of the visible light, so that the film was exposed mostly by IR wavelengths.  As a result I did NOT compensate with any filter factor, and the film was rated at 100iso.  The exposure was for 1/8 second at F22.0.

War Wounds

My Renegades hockey team elected not to sign up for the summer season this year.  I signed up to play the Spring/Summer season in my Vintage league.  Starting in early April there is a hockey game scheduled every Thursday morning at 11:15, running until the end of June.

There are a few guys on my team that I played with during the past winter season.  And there are a number of guys that I played with last summer, plus a few new ones.

The first game of the season was last week and I missed it as I was away in Saskatchewan for the Beer Parlour Project.  The second game of the season was on April 16th, and I made it out to that one.  It was a fun game and the skill level and the pace is slightly higher than the team I played with last winter.

I got clipped by a wrist shot as I was defending in front of the net.  There are only a couple of spots on your body that are not protected by padding.  One is the stomach and the other is the inside of the thighs.  The shot clipped in a very small area below the hockey pants and above the shin pads where there is no protection.  It was simply a shot on goal, which I blocked, at the expense of this ugly bruise.  I felt the burn right away and knew it would be a good one.  By the time the game ended and I changed out of my gear it was getting pretty red.  By evening it turned dark purple.  Unless you've played the game you can not imagine the pain of being hit by a puck in a lightly protected or unprotected area.  Those frozen pucks are really hard, and travel with a lot of speed and force.

The next day, it was even worse, and a lot more purple.  It looks worse than it feels, and although it's a little tender, it doesn't really hurt that much... anymore...

Heading for Home

Monday April 13th was check out day at the rental house in Macklin.  After morning coffee Byron, Chris and I packed up all of our gear, and tidied things up around the house.  By late morning we said our goodbyes, and Chris and Byron headed off towards Calgary.

It took me slightly longer to get my gear packed up but I hit the road a short time later.  I headed back up Highway 13 towards Edmonton, and made a few stops along the way.  First I stopped at the Amisk Hotel and dropped off some history books that we had borrowed from the town library.  

I took my time, and wandered around on a few backroads a little.  I found the North Rosyth School and took a photograph here with the view camera.  I also stopped in Lougheed, hoping to photograph the old hotel.  But the light wasn't right and all the good angles were backlit, so the view camera never came out at this stop.

It's interesting that the tallest portion of the hotel, on the highway side, was once the hotel in the nearby town of Sedgewick.  It was loaded up and moved to Lougheed many years ago.  In the years following there were additions made to the hotel.  It has been closed for some time, which is rather sad, as it would have made a great location for the Beer Parlour Project.

The rest of the drive was somewhat uneventful, though I did make note of a couple of interesting old farmyards in the Camrose area.  I will likely take a day trip out that way in the not too distant future.  I arrived back home by early evening and saw another successful BP trip come to an end.

Sunday Drive

Chris, Byron and I had booked one extra day at the rental house in Macklin.  There wasn't any point trying to visit any more Beer Parlours on Sunday April 12th as most of them aren't open on Sundays.  In fact most of them aren't open on Monday either.  

We decided to spend the day exploring and did a big loop around Macklin.  We started to the southeast, and then circled around to the south, and then eventually headed north.  We stopped at an old trestle bridge on a long abandoned rail line, and a grain elevator on the same line.  We found a couple of old farm buildings along the way, and a couple of decaying small towns.

In one of the towns there were two abandoned schools.  An old one that had been abandoned when the new one was built, and the abandoned newer one, which was shut down.  The few students remaining in the area are now bused to larger centers.

The ever present flocks of geese were all over the place, and at times the skies were full of them.  On this day the miserable wind seemed to have let up a little, so I was actually able to get my view camera out and take a few photographs.  It still wasn't very pleasant, but it was better than it had been in recent days.

As the afternoon wound down to evening we made our way back to the rental house.  With no old hotels to visit on this day it would just be a relaxing evening to unwind, before packing up and heading home the next day.  Chris and I ended up going to the local Chinese restaurant and there was a buffet on.  Byron decided to stay behind at the house and take it easy and made a meal of some of the stuff we brought along.

Beer Parlour Project - BP43.0 Royal George Hotel

On Saturday April 11th the gang visited the Royal George Hotel in Luseland, Saskatchewan.  Luseland is the next town down the rail line from Denzil.  We met with owners Dot and Brad and visited with them through the evening.  Attendance was light on the night of our visit, and I think there may have been some other event going on in the area.  In any event we enjoyed visiting and meeting with the people that were around, and I managed to take a couple of portraits.  The hotel itself is rather large and has a rather dominant presence on the corner of Strathcona Street and Pacific Avenue.  In most Saskatchewan towns these would have been named Main and Railway.  Perhaps at some future date, if we are in the area, we can make a return visit on a busier night.  In the meantime this is officially Beer Parlour Project outing number BP43.0.

More Tooling Around

On Saturday April 10th we headed out from the rental house in Macklin.  We went out exploring for the day.  We headed to the east and south of Macklin and stopped at a bunch of old grain elevators and a couple of small towns.  

The weather was overcast, cool and that ever present cold spring wind was upon us again.  Yet again I was forced to leave my view camera in the vehicle and only managed a bunch of snapshots with my phone.  The spring migration seemed to be in full swing and there were geese everywhere.  The Canada Geese seemed to have arrived a little earlier but the Snow Geese were now arriving in huge flocks.  They sometimes were all across the sky from horizon to horizon.  We saw a few flocks of Sandhill Cranes as well.

We found a few interesting stops along the way.  One of the relatively modern grain elevators that we visited had only been recently abandoned and was still fairly intact.  The scale was still there, as well as the control panel.  There was even a piano in the office.  Another elevator that we stopped at had been heavily damaged by recent winds, and part of the roof was ripped off.

Some goose tracks in the mud, and old service station, a couple of old houses, and a fire truck rounded out our discoveries for the day.

We stopped for lunch at the Denzil Hotel and wanted to say hello to the owner Jenn.  She was away at a couple of catering events and it was good to see that her business is doing well.  The Beer Parlour Project visited her establishment last year.  As the afternoon wound down we made our way southeast to Luseland for a planned visit to the hotel there.

Beer Parlour Project - BP42.0 Czar Hotel

At about 3:30 in the afternoon on April 10th we rolled into the Czar Hotel, in Czar Alberta.  This was the forty second hotel that we have visited for the project and therefore is referred to as BP42.0.  We went inside and introduced ourselves to the owner, Val.  Although she had been managing the hotel for a number of years, she had just become the owner a couple of months ago.  She named the tavern Bella's Bar, and was doing a great job of promoting the place locally.

Friday night is steak night, and for $34 you get a nice strip loin steak, grilled to your liking, with garlic toast.  In addition to that there was a large buffet that featured baked potatoes with all the fixings, scalloped potatoes, vegetables, baked beans, salad and dessert.  It was really good, and one of the best meals we have had in a hotel in quite some time.

A reporter from the newspaper in nearby Wainwright came out to write an article about our project.  Sukie was very interested and took a lot of photos, and interviewed everyone.  She stayed for the steak dinner and got a good feel for the vibe of a small town tavern.  Previous newspaper reporters that were out to earlier locations generally just hung around long enough for a quick story and a couple snapshots, but never really got the true feel of the place.  It was nice to see that Sukie took a really serious interest in our project.

The place was pretty busy for steak night and we stayed fairly late into the evening taking portraits and visiting with everyone.  It was a great outing and we really enjoyed it.  By the time we got back to the rental house in Macklin we were pretty exhausted.  It had been a long day of exploring and lots of fresh air, and then the chaotic environment of Bella's Bar all evening.  It doesn't' get much better...!