travel


Arrived in Battleford around 10 PM, Katy was exhausted but due to excitement and the lingering daylight had a hard time getting to sleep which was aggravating.

Rob was in the full throes of illness and is not a happy road tripper.

The room at the Gold Eagle was nice. A brand new hotel near a casino (which are literally everywhere up here) there was one problem. It’s a wood-frame structure so when people walk over head it has a ceiling fixture shaking effect.

At first I thought the people above had a small child who wouldn’t sleep but the thudding and running continued unabated the entire night. Even a call to the front desk didn’t help. In fact I think it made it worse for a while.

We finally turned on the fan for the a/c for a bit of white noise, but only Katy really slept deeply.

So, up for today is border crossing and a marathon to Minot. But thankfully it is a Holiday Inn Express, a little bit of sameness everywhere we go, and hey, perhaps I will be a novelist by Sunday given the inn’s ability to confer great career powers on all who stay over.


Do you remember the old television Kung Fu? David Carradine played a half Chinese/half American Shaolin priest named Kwai Chang Caine who was a wanted fugitive in China traveling through the western part of the United States searching for his half-brother, Danny. I loved that showed. I even liked the cable revival of it with Carradine, again playing a Shaolin priest but the descendant of the original Caine and this time with a son who was a San Francisco cop. But I digress, sort of. I was reading MSNBC and ran across a link to an article about a Shaolin Temple in Beijing that just upgraded it’s tourist restroom facilities to the tune of $3 million yuan (that’s $430, 000 U.S. dollars). The biggest of the restrooms is 1,614 square feet and boasts a changing station, uniformed cleaners and an LCD television in the foyer – to watch the Olympic torch wind its way serenely to the Summer Games no doubt. Wow, the Shaolin must draw some serious travel traffic. I am impressed with the concern for the elimination comfort of tourists though as it is a definite step up from the one unisex washroom per store that Safeway promotes up here in the Great White North, and a whole lot better than those holes in the ground with a metal hole topped with a toilet lid that the National Park System in the U.S. calls tourist adequate.