Day Trip with Hailey

I slept in both days this weekend.  Still really tired from all the hockey I played the last month or so... an average of three games a week...!  On Saturday, after I finally got up, I went over to the Latino grocery store and picked up some stuff.  Then I went to the shop for a while and sort of half-heartedly worked on some cabinets.  Then I picked up a few more groceries at the regular store, and went home to make supper.  I made a big batch of enchiladas, some of which we had for dinner that night some and some of which got frozen for later.  I also made some home made tortilla chips.  While I was doing that Margarit made a batch of Mexican Rice.  We finally got around to eating dinner at about 9:00.

I slept in again on Sunday and then when I eventually got mobile, I checked to see if any of the girls were interested in coming out for a day trip.  Anna was not interested, and Helena was getting together with a friend, but Hailey reluctantly decided to come along.  It was close to 2:00 when we finally got out of town, and snowing lightly to boot.

We headed east through Elk Island National Park and by then the snow had quit and the skies were breaking open a bit.  There was only a light breeze and with the temperature struggling up to about +6 or so, it wasn't too bad.  There were a lot of bison along the roads in the park.  I think they were coming out to the open road sides to graze on the little bit of green grass that was starting to come to life.  We saw them in three or four different areas of the park and the way through, and then more again at the end of the day when we returned home.

In between we drove some backroads up in Lamont County.  I stopped to take a shot of what I think must have been an old community hall in St. Michael.  There was a nearby abandoned house that was kind of interesting as well.  After that we checked out the cemetery at the nearby Roman Catholic Church.  We drove around for a couple of hours and stopped to photograph a dead roadside jackpine.  We also stopped and checked out a few old abandoned buildings and the big camera made it out of the truck a few times.  Hailey was shooting with my medium format Hasselblad system.  Its been a long time since she's done that and she needed a crash course to learn how to do it again.  She didn't pester me with too many questions so it must have come back to her fairly quickly and reasonably well.  There was some rain and snow in the city while we were gone, but we didn't really get any more than a few flakes, and most of that was on the drive out.

We stopped to check out a couple old threshing machines just off the road.  We thought it was OK to wander over and have a look, as we weren't "Trasspassing"