This is a very weird place.

The largest single crop in the province is wheat. They grow more of it here than anywhere in the country. There is only one brewery in Saskatchewan, and they don’t make a wheat beer.

But that’s just where it starts.

Biggar, despite what the sign may say, is not bigger than New York. Biggar may not, in fact, be bigger than the average New York grocery store. There’s probably less to buy too.

On the outskirts of the the town, there are three signs. The first is the famous sign referred to above; the second a tribute to one of Biggar’s most famous citizens - Sandra Schmirler, the Curler; the third a tribute to the Hanson Buck the world record white tail, shot 7 kilometres north east of Biggar.

That’s right - a gold medalist and a deer. Ask around town too…sure they say the Curler is more important to to your face but you can see it in their eyes; it’s really the buck.

People drive here too. Not that silly kind of three hours is a long drive thing - three hours is just a starting point. Biggar is an hour away from Saskatoon (where we’re staying) and people are doing the trip multiple times in a day! What’s up with that?

Festivities have been entertaining though - the town parade was a fairly typical small town parade, although there were more people there than expected. Many families have come home this weekend, and the Biggar cemetery saw more than a few coming in to visit while we were there, for a period of only half an hour.

Biggar traffic is weird though. While most cities or towns would have two way stops, allowing traffic to flow smoothly in one direction while the other provided the right of way, Biggar has two way yields. What does a two way yield mean, really? It has a certain discomforting ambiguity to it that I dislike.

Tomorrow is a motorcycle rally, but this fledgling rider won’t be sticking around for it. An absolutely gorgeous old silver and black Honda 450 was seen buzzing around town. If I had the money, I’d buy it flat out. This bike must be 20 years old and it looks like it just came off the lot - totally my style too.

The town is raffling off a 1972 Lincoln Mark IV. I’ve got one last chance tomorrow to get a $2 ticket for this bad boy - draw to be held in August. I might still.

Driving to Biggar (or anywhere in Saskatoon) from Calgary is interesting too. I’m pretty sure these roads are the ones that are going to be driven on auto-pilot first. There’s a few turns around Drumheller, but after that? Pretty much right ahead. All those old jokes about being able to see your dog for miles when it runs away aside, you could see your dog for miles if it ran away on much of this country. Flat doesn’t do it justice. My Grandmother’s sister Betty used an expression her father used to use, calling the flats the place “where even the Jackrabbit packed a lunch.” I’m not sure that made any sense at all, but I laughed anyway.

So my trip started with a visit to my Grandmother’s sister, headed east across the flatlands and now I’m in Saskatoon again having spent the entire day in Biggar. Lest you think there’s nothing to do…well, there’s nothing to do. No matter - fun was had, and a healthy pancakes breakfast was followed up by a heart roast beef dinner at which the names of the cows that had been slaughtered were posted on the wall.

I may have been making a bit of that last part up - I’m just seeing if you’re still paying attention. I’ll let you figure out the parts.

The Biggar museum, as part of this homecoming, has asked families to prepare pages for a memory book to be kept there. My mother’s lovingly assembled pages (with her cousin Pat) were there along with others. Lobb’s left bigger a while ago, and weren’t really prominent citizens, but we met a few people who knew my grandfather. That’s the kind of special thing these trips are made of.

It seems like every house in Biggar was built by the person who first lived in it. Most of these houses look like military style housing, and each and every one has both a huge TV antenna on it, and an ExpressVu sattelite dish. It’s pretty funny really, in a quaint way.

Tomorrow we leave Saskatoon (a one Starbucks town) and pass through Biggar again on our way to La Fleche, a town with about 2,200 fewer people in it than Biggar. That should be fun. It’ll be the first time in years I get to see my mom’s friends Paula and Don who used to live in Trenton, so I’m looking forward too it.

We’re trying to find a way to swing the Columbia Icefields into this trip too; if I’d known that, we would have planned it differently. How’s that for variety though? BC Mountains to Saskatchewan prarie to a receding Glacier. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Posted by skooter at 6:21 PM This entry is filed under Travel.
This entry is tagged: Road Trip, Saskatchewan, Travel