Aylmer Express "MoHo" Extravaganza 2006

forfend \for-FEND\, transitive verb:
1. a. (Archaic) To prohibit; to forbid. b. To ward off; to prevent; to avert.
2. To defend; to protect; to preserve.

I must apologize for all my typos so far … as well as the ones to come. When I get a chance to take a look at what I have already published I am amazed at all the crap that seems to slip by. Sorry about that. I do try to fix what I can once I see it. In particular, I have to point out that in the July 23 entry, the name of the river is the Saskatchewan River not the Saskatoon River as I had originally stated.

I’m going to start by providing everyone with the answer to the question to which has been on all of your minds for the past few days I’m sure. The crops, about which I asked you, that are displayed in the July 20th blog entry, are indeed … flax !!! You read it here first. For a little background on this lovely little crop, you can check out what they have to say about flax on Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flax ). I must apologize for originally stating the incorrect colour for the flower of this plant. I just read that flax is one of the only truly blue flowers (not mauve).

Today we made our way from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to Edmonton, Alberta. Perhaps this might be a good time to mention that the two-letter short form for Saskatchewan is SK. This should save me quite a bit of time with the next paragraph. We actually saw a some shirts at the SK tourist office with the following saying, “Saskatchewan: Hard to Spell, Easy to draw” with a little image of the province beside it. I agree ... and I like their sense of humour. We spent most of the day driving so there is not a whole lot to report. The scenery was pretty much more of the same across the rest of SK but I must admit many of the undulating fields we past throughout the province were quite beautiful in a peaceful sort of way. We stopped in Lloydminster and found an interesting display in front of the SK Tourist Office. Someone there had the bright idea to plant some samples of the main crops that you see as you drive through their province. So by having a small sample of the different crops right beside each other you can not only see what wheat looks like but you can also see the quiddity when compared to, say, oats, for instance. That certainly helps for the many city folk like me who don’t know our canola from our flax. Lloydminster is also one of those cities that has a border running though it, just like Kansas City. Lloydminster straddles SK and Alberta just like Kansas City straddles Missouri and Kansas. One interesting thing I found out about Lloydminster is that since Alberta does not charge provincial tax, SK has made an exception for the businesses in the SK part of Lloydminster and exempted them from having to charge provincial sales tax. Otherwise there would very few businesses on the SK side of the border in that town.

The funny thing is that almost immediately as soon as we crossed into Alberta, the land became more rolling hills than plains. I was surprised how sudden this change seemed. Of course, I guess any change at all seems sudden after days and days of the same old thing.