Oops, we were too busy being old ladies to post last night

Today (yesterday) we discovered the awesomeness of Jamie's eyesight. She was the first one to spot a 30 foot moose, annnd the first one to spot the prairie. We went to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and found that it should be easy to find a 30 foot moose, but it wasn't. As a side note, 75 year old motorcycle men from BC cannot take legit pictures of people AND a 30 foot moose. See pictures for details.

We discovered that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have not actually been on horseback for 50 years. Also, it is the USA's fault that the Mountees were created and everyone hates American whiskey traders. Colleen would like to add that it was not her people's fault, but only Katie's. Colleen and Amanda became Mountees in the child-sized costumes, although it may have cut off their breathing. Katie and Jamie combined make one Mountee. We watched a troop of RCMP doing drill practice which was sweet, and then we watched 1st graders do it which was creepy.

Then we drove to Saskatoon, and it was really flat with some random hills thrown in for kicks. We found that Saskatoon's downtown is only a block, despite the fact that it's Saskatchewan's largest city. Across from the hotel was a sandwich place called Badass Jack's, so of course we had to eat dinner there. When we enter the hotel, we found an alternate universe/igloo/hobbit hole on the second floor. Sadly, the rest of the hallway to the room did not match that. We went on a mini pub crawl through Saskatoon for Amanda's birthday and sampled some more Canadian beers. Great Western is brewed in Saskatoon, Rickard's White from P.E.I., and Grasshopper from Calgary (our next stop). Jamie and Amanda experienced the coldest temperatures ever when we went into the liquor store to find the Grasshopper, but they survived without frostbite.

After we finished the beer and uploaded some photos, we passed out because we are all secretly 80 years old.

Now we're on our way to Calgary, stopping at Beaver Conservation Area before we leave Saskatoon. This was a group effort, p.s., which is why it's so random. Amanda thanks everyone for the birthday wishes, and thanks to Mom Earp for the tinnybopper card!

We <3 Amanda!

IT IS AMANDA'S 22ND BIRTHDAY AND WE ARE EXCITED!!!

Oh, and we're safely in Saskatoon and we saw Royal Mounties, a 30 foot moose statue, and some prairie dogs today. Yay!

We have skipped time zones twice now and have a third one to go in a few days, so please know that I'm not really still awake at 2.07AM. That's just preposterous.

checklists and bison and drumlins, oh my!

Slowly but surely uploading photos... today is day eight already!

When I was in high school, a bunch of us from youth group were at a diner, probably after forcing our youth pastor to bring us to a Presbytery meeting or something. I probably made some offhanded comment about how my goal in life was to break 200,000 miles in the car I drove at the time (a Nissan Stanza which died at nearly 204,000 during my junior year of college) and then I could die happy. Well, Wayne, our youth pastor, did not find that acceptable and wrote a list of things I needed to do before I died on the back of the diner placemat, including but not limited to: live outside of NJ for more than a year (check), kiss a prairie dog (check), and travel to Saskatchewan... CHECK! Another item on the list was "drive on the edge", very unspecific, but I'm pretty sure I've done that in the past week: the edge of the Great Lakes, the edge of America, the edge of Canada, the edge of FLAT, FLAT, FLAT LAND.

But we got to see some bison, and that rocked! Actually, I've enjoyed the flat drive. It's flat. It's very different from the flat I come from, living next to the ocean. It's flat and grassy. And flat. But it's pretty, and I manage to find random minor glacial landforms and other geographic phenomena. Society might call me nerdtastic. Society would be absolutely correct.

Tomorrow we're going to check out the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Heritage Center and carry on to Saskatoon via Moose Jaw. Life is awesome.

By the way, JACK Parental Units, we are incredibly amused by the plethora of ways you have decided to sign your comments besides "Mom" and "Dad" since there's four of each of you. Keep up the good work.