On Day Two of our trip we got up and took advantage of the free breakfast, included with our rooms at the hotel. It was actually pretty good, and we all enjoyed it. The day had dawned clear and sunny and it was very humid. The central part of Saskatchewan didn't appear as though it had received as much rain as we did back in Alberta, but the humidity was still pretty stifflling.
After breakfast we set out to the Northeast of the City, with a few destinations in mind. We had to cross the South Saskatchewan River on the Clarksboro Ferry. From there we continued northeast in the general direction of Melfort, though we never made it that far.
As we had done the day prior, we pulled off the highway and drove into some of the small towns we encountered along the way. It seems there is almost always at least one worthwhile photographic subject in almost every little.
We found a ghost town that was heavily overgrown. There was not much left of most of the buildings and what was left was heavily overgrown with carraganas. The old hotel was kind of interesting, but the floors and the roof were so badly rotted out that we didn't dare step into the place. It was while I was shooting here that I noticed a tick crawling on my darkcloth. This was very reminiscent of the trip my friend Rob and I made to Saskatchewan about six years ago. We encountered a lot of the disgusting little things that time too. People always seem to think that they drop onto you out of trees and bushes but apparently they are more commonly in tall grass.
In another town we found an old church. Some of the locals told us that it never was officially a church and that it was only a temporary "place of worship" while the main church was being built. The town now owns the building and has it up for sale, so we were allowed to go in and take a look around.
We travelled as far as a large wood trestle bridge on an abandoned rail line. This bridge spans the broad valley of McCloy Creek and is supposed to be the largest wood trestle in Saskatchewan. I'd guess it to be at least a quarter mile long. Unfortunately a fence was erected at either end and we couldn't actually get onto the bridge. But we spent a couple of hours here shooting from where we could. It was really hot and the humidity was overbearing, so this ended up being as far as we travelled. The temperature peaked in the late afternoon at around +32C.
On the way back we checked out a couple more towns and found one with the body of an old hearse mounted onto the chassis of a 4x4. And further along we found some really photogenic abandoned grain elevators, but they were out in a field and there was no way to get close to them without damaging the crop. Perhaps we need to make a return visit in the fall once the harvest is done.
We got back to our hotel by mid-evening and settled down. Sharon found a tick on her leg that had started feeding. Later in the evening I found another one crawling on me, but it had not yet latched on. And the next morning we found yet another crawling on the walls of the shower.
Being concerned about lyme disease, we all checked some online information and Sharon called her doctor. Fortunately the tick has to finish feeding, which takes 24 to 36 hours, before the lyme disease bacteria is transferred. There was no way that the tick had been on Sharon for any more than a couple hours, so this put her at ease.
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