An aborted hike attempt today as well as a report on an ongoing skirmish we’re having in the rig…as of this morning the score is Americans 2 – Canadian Mice 0. Connie claims they’re probably actually North Dakotan Mice that illegally entered Canadia without showing a passport but they’re both dead and neither of them said “Eh.”…so their exact lineage ain’t exactly clear. More on that later though.

Our plan for the day was a ride an hour north and west of Langham to Redberry Lake where we were going to go on a hike out to Millennium Point to bird watch…so after coffee and breakfast we packed our selves Morning Snack™ and headed out. Twenty miles or so west on SK-16 then north on a gravel road another 17 miles or so to the lake. We followed the Canadian free GPS we have and not the truck GPS and it led us off of the gravel road onto the goat path portion of the drive…guess it musta came out as slightly shorter when the algorithm did it’s thing and it wasn’t much worse than the gravel road anyway.

We paid our $5CN entry fee, parked, got all our hiking stuff on and headed out. Made it about a half mile into the hike and it pretty much turned into another death march…when we started to ask ourselves where the machete was to hack our way through we gave up and went back to the car. We knew there was a road out to the end but had thought the hike would be nicer…turned out that the trail (a) kept crossing the road and (b) wasn’t on the lake short so no views…so we elected to drive out to the end and see what there was to see before heading home. Here are shots from our trip.

Red Winged Blackbird Male.

Loon cruising on the surface and then submerging.

White Pelicans…turns out they summer here but we never knew that…a whole bunch of them in the lake.

American Avocet…a new bird for us.

Marbled Godwit…another new one for us.

The lake view.

We stopped at the pit toilet at the point before heading home and then punched in “Home, James.” on the truck GPS as we didn’t know the exact coordinates for the campground…they’re written in the Book of all Knowledge™ which we cleverly didn’t bring with us today. The truck GPS routed us on only about 4 kilometers of gravel road than back onto paved road…albeit it about another 8 miles farther home but the same time due to to paved roads. We got home, had lunch and a shower and then headed off to downtown Saskatoon to check it out as well as have dinner.

St Paul’s Catholic Cathedral.

For dinner we stopped in at O’Shea’s Irish Pub…it was a close tossup between it…the British Pub, and the Canadian Tap Pub but we woulda had to walk farther away from where we parked BAT if we had gone back to one of the other two…and we were tired so O’Shea’s it was. We got seated at the bar and found out there was good news and bad news. The good news was that they had a tap for Kilkenny Cream Ale…the amber ale with a brewing technique and head like a stout that we dearly loved over in Ireland…the bad news was that the keg was dead and there was no more in the cooler until Monday. So we opted for a couple pints-o’-Guinness instead and ordered food…O’Shea’s Loaded Potato for Connie and Shepard’s Pie for Neil. Both were out standing and we had enough of Connie’s potato dish left over for lunch today. The Shepard’s Pie…not so much…he ate it all.

Afterwards we headed home and watched TV until it was time to lay out the defenses for the night’s warfare.

To set the stage…2 nights ago right about 2100 at night Neil spotted the invaders…a sneaky little mouse crawling under the edge of our fridge. Connie…naturally…freaked over this, Neil was concerned and figured it was a problem that needed solving but not quite to the Line in the Sand Fight to the Death stage. We set up 3 traps and went to bed…arising early the next morning to find the invader had been killed by one of our cunningly placed anti-personnel mines.

**WARNING.WARNING. DANGER WILL ROBINSON. DEAD MOUSE PICTURES AHEAD.**

Skip ahead 3 clicks/screens in your scrollbar if you’re squeamish about these sorts of things. I thought about just linking to them so you would have to deliberately click on them to see them…but it was more work than I was interested in…and they’re just dead mice anyway.

Connie…again naturally…freaked over this and couldn’t understand why Neil didn’t run out in his jammies to dispose of the body…he said that (a) I haven’t had any coffee yet and (b) It’s dead, Jim and isn’t coming back to life as a zombie mouse. He got rid of it an hour or so later.

Last night we figured we had wiped the enemy out but decided to rebait our traps again just in case and headed off to bed.

This morning we found another invader…likewise dispatched by our defenses.

Connie…again naturally, we’re starting to see a pattern here…freaked. Again Neil had coffee before disposing of the body.

So…we think we probably picked these up sometime before crossing the border which would make Connie’s guess of illegal immigrant mice more likely but there’s no firm proof either way. We’ll set the traps again tonight just in case we haven’t wiped them them out to the last mouse and Neil will check under our sink and in the basement and underbelly to see if he can see any signs of further intruders. 

He keeps telling her that we live in the woods and mice are a way of life…Jen’s mother Kim told her that they caught 4 in one day in their 5ver down in VA recently…but I’m not sure she’s buying it. Still though…these are the first mice we’ve seen in 3 years in the rig except for one dead one we found up in the battery compartment 2 winters back after our last trek out to the Canadian Rockies. I’ll report later on any further skirmishes…hopefully we’ve got them all now.

Our friends Bill and Linda Napier are due to arrive today…the site next to us is empty and supposedly reserved for them although their name isn’t up on the board yet…but it’s only 1000. Neil was gonna grill but given it’s raining and we’re not sure that it will clear up before grill time he is going to regroup and make Spaghetti Bolognese instead.

Cyas.