I took my leave of my nephew as he went to work. I organized some stuff in my car and when I turned to wave he was already gone to work. We’d said our goodbyes already. I wound the car through the hills north to the Trans-Canada highway and through Sicamous and before long I was on the highway and pulling into Revelstoke for gas.

The car is working quite well for this portion of the trip and has become much less of a character in my ongoing saga. Now it is my health that takes centre stage as my shingles fades and the pain diminishes. I crossed the mountains with intermittent rainstorms and then was delayed a long while on the drive into Calgary. The highway maintenance crews had made one lane out of two and that slowed traffic to a long crawl over the hills as people fought to merge and get ahead of their neighbours instead of joining the line one car at a time. Ahead of us, on the hills of the city, lightning forked down, by times three strikes at once. I dreaded coming into the city with a huge storm and rush hour, but as it turned out, it moved off to the north as I bypassed the city.

The road east of Calgary opened up to a huge horizon and the hills flattened into the broad prairie of the interior plateau. I gassed up in Bassano, where I was about to leave the highway. I asked a woman working the till what the forecast was going to be and comically she glanced outside and said it was going to be cloudy and then seemed to shake herself and added there would be rain in the night. I was already thinking it was going to be stormy for huge banks of nimbus clouds hung over the dropping sun. I drove away from the clouds to where the sky, strangely, was lighter ahead of me in the east, lit from above by the sun’s rays that crept over the towering black clouds.

When I came to Rosemary I took the road to Patricia, but instead of turning into the Badlands I kept going to Iddesleigh and Jenner. Every slough was full and there was water on the road. The grid roads were heavy with clay and trucks turning onto the highway were smeared with mud. I’d been looking forward to trekking through the badlands again, but with this much water in the mud and more on its way, it would be terrible hiking. Your feet would be weighed down with gumbo and the mud hills too slick to climb.

I drove past Jenner until I came to a side road where the road curved. I took it north for a short distance and then turned off it to the driveway that served one of the communications towers. They make for good camping because they are public property so no one feels inclined to harass someone camping there. I moved some clothes around to pad the emergency brake and pulled my sleeping bag over my head and spent an uncomfortable night until the sun rose clear at five to wake me. I waited it out and left at seven. No one had even driven by the night, and my tracks in the dirt were alone.

I drove the 555 to the highway that runs north and south along Alberta’s eastern border and then turned south to the road to Burstall. When I drove across the border into Saskatchewan and then past Burstall, I was already thinking the road through the sand hills might be impassable because of the rain, so I turned north when I came to Leibenthal and then east to the Lancer and  Cabri highway.

This is one of my favourite drives, along the towns of Sceptre and Portreeve and Abbey. When I dropped south on those roads I drove north to cross the South Saskatchewan River and then along various paved and unpaved roads into Saskatoon on the 7.