So Wednesday night a massive thunderstorm rolled through Vermilion, the kind that doesn’t just arrive—it attacks. The rain was torrential, hammering the trailer roof like it was trying to get in, and the lightning was relentless, the horror‑movie kind where there’s no pause between flashes. By morning, the site beside us had turned into a shallow lake and the road out was a churned-up sea of mud. We were in no hurry to test our luck.
Once we finally got underway, the weather slowly remembered how to behave. Crossing into Saskatchewan the sky opened up, the clouds thinned, and eventually the sun made a proper appearance. Our second stop was Saskatoon, but on the way we passed through North Battleford, home to one of the Western Development Museums—a whole chain dedicated to Saskatchewan’s history. This particular one had an entire 1900s village of original houses and shops, plus what felt like a million pieces of farm machinery. Steam engines, tractors, oddball implements whose purpose we could only guess at. We happily lost two hours wandering through it all, marveling at the rare tractors from the 1920s to the 1940s and wondering where on earth they’d found them—and how much work had gone into keeping them alive.
After the museum, the drive along Highway 16 was pretty uneventful, though for a major route the road conditions were surprisingly rough. Still, we were glad enough to roll into Saskatoon and settle the trailer into Gordon Howe Campground for the night.
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