Why Saskatchewan Should Be on your Bucket List | Ep. 47

Picking up where we left off, We were detailing the Great Canadian Roadtrip of 2021 which saw us travel West through Alberta  and back. When we last left off we promised to come back and detail our stay at Pike Lake Provincial Park…and we will get to that but first, I want to detail why you shouldn’t sleep on Saskatchewan as a vacation destination.

Saskatchewan has a broad reputation in much of Canada as a fly-over or drive through Province, Saskatchewan, however is among the most fascinating provinces you can visit, with warm people, small town charms and a ton of different, and fascinating eco systems to explore.

Known as the “Land of the Living Skies” SK does have amazing views of the sky from pretty much everywhere, given the flat prairie landscape, but it is so much more than flat and boring.

Did you know, there is a Buoyant Salt Lake, known as the Dead Sea of Canada in SK? That located at Little Manitou Lake near Watrous SK. The home of buoyancy and famed healing waters, you can also camp at the Manitou and District Regional Park, which has 108 fully serviced, sites as well as a variety of electric and non electric sites ranging from $24-37 per night. This park also has a pretty nice playgrounds, a golf course and beach area and is well worth the visit.

There is also an amazing Sand Dunes Provincial park which is so far North it’s almost in the Northwest Territories? How about Coulees, Bison, Rattlesnakes and Even Quicksand? All of those can be found at Grasslands National Park, as well as a Boreal Forest in Prince Albert National Park. All of that and 100,000 lakes to keep you swimming and fishing to your hearts content.

All of this and provincial camping fees that offer amazing amenities for camping fees which are 40% cheaper than Ontario Parks

One of the best of those is Pike Lake Provincial Park

PIKE LAKE

Located 20 minutes south of Saskatoon, Pike Lake Provincial Park is the perfect home base visiting Saskatoon and surrounding area. Lots of shaded sites and situated on the South Saskatchewan River, the park offers various recreational opportunities for visitors to enjoy including water activities, playgrounds, tennis, pickle ball and beach volleyball courts, mini golf and a popular outdoor pool with a waterslide. There is a 1.5-km Nature Trail begins at the interpretive centre and provides a great opportunity to experience the diverse wildlife and ecosystems contained within the park. 

Best, the Barrier-Free playground and Lakeside Promenade Trail features a level boardwalk surface and enables anyone to take advantage of what the park has to offer.

220 Sites. All Electric except sites 211-220. Rates are $33 for electric and $20 for non-electric. 

Fee for pool of $5/$2 youth

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Transcript

1 (5s): Hello everybody and welcome to the RV Canucks podcast, the show that is all about soaking up the most of that sweet, sweet weekend warrior RV life. And the show that shows you just how far you can go on your vacations from work. It’s been a year quite literally, but we are back in the saddle. So maybe let’s reintroduce ourselves. I’m Molina, and across from me is my husband Dan. Hello. And together with our kids we are the RV Connects. We are based in southwestern Ontario and we travel North America and we bring you along on all of our adventures. Okay, it’s been a minute you guys. Welcome back to everybody. We have taken literally the bulk of the last year off and thankfully all of you have stuck with us through our intermittent adventures, but we are, like I said earlier, back in the saddle and ready to get going. 1 (55s): What’s been going on in our lives? 2 (57s): Well, I think work has been really, really busy cuz as we mentioned, we’re both kind of in new jobs and that was a challenge. You did some traveling last summer into Europe. The girls were working then the girls started hockey. I ran it through my head today and I think between the two of them they’ve been on the ice over 200 times this winter. So I think we’re just trying to keep everybody from not having to have chicken fingers for dinner every single night 1 (1m 21s): Pretty much. Yeah, I think that sums it up nicely. We’ve done a couple of cool things. We, we did a radio spot a couple of weeks ago here on a local talk radio show where we talked about the RV connects and luckily as we look out the window here, the snow is rapidly mounting and we are getting ready to hitch up and hit the road again this summer as well as working on and hopefully crossing our fingers. Finishing Sally, our 1964 Glenda aluminum sided travel trailer, which has been in flux for the last couple of years, but she’s not gone, she’s around. Several listeners constantly ask us what happened to Sally And Sally is in indoor storage right now, so we’re hoping to have her done by the end of this summer. 2 (2m 4s): Yep. I think that the radio spot we did with the nice weather got us excited to do the podcast again cuz we’ve really missed it. We’ve got ideas about Sally. I’m trying to convince Molina to move this over to YouTube but she doesn’t think we should. That’s only for retired people and I’m like, well one must do what one must do, but so we’ll figure things out. It’s gonna be a summer. 1 (2m 25s): Are you suggesting early retirement Dan? 2 (2m 28s): All right, let’s get outta here. Wrap this thing up, let’s go. 1 (2m 32s): Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice? When we left you last, we were detailing our trip back from the west and as you’ll remember in 2021 we took off a little bit of time and hit the road for the great Canadian road trip and that saw us travel west through Alberta and back in Covid times in the thick of Covid times. So we did opt out of coming back through the USA due to the testing costs that were in place at the time, the time. So we sort of traveled out and traveled back by relatively the same route. However, we did take some time to stop in Saskatchewan on the way back, but first I think we wanna detail why you shouldn’t sleep on Saskatchewan as a travel destination and as a vacation destination in general. 1 (3m 15s): So I know for the most of the rest of Canada, I guess there’s kind of a broad reputation in Saskatchewan as just being like a flyover or a drive through province where you d you kind of you go and it’s flat and it’s boring and you get through it as quickly as possible. And that’s certainly the perception that anybody we had talked to had given us prior to kind of really heading out there and spending some time. And we used to have family out in the province so we’re kind of familiar with Saskatchewan, but I would say even the two of us, we probably didn’t give Saskatchewan a fair 2 (3m 48s): Shot. Yeah, we didn’t know as much as 1 (3m 49s): We should. So I would say with all of that being said, Saskatchewan is literally a powerhouse. It’s among the most fascinating provinces you can ever visit. The people are warm, they’re small town charm. There’s a ton of different and fascinating ecosystems to explore and there’s so much to do that you wouldn’t think possible in a prairie province. So we’ll get into some of that, but maybe let us in on your thoughts. 2 (4m 15s): So I’m gonna qualify this and say this, A lot comes from the driver’s seat because I do a good chunk of the driving so I see the whole place and I just get lots of time to ponder as we drive through. So there’s a couple of things that stick out for me. One is the landscape changes a lot and so we all have this stereotypical dog river type impression that it’s just wheat fields and it’s really not just wheat fields, there’s wheat fields but there’s some wetlands and there’s some forests and it’s a little bit of everything. And so that’s really nice. And then of course we all think of the postcard view of grain elevators and there are grain elevators, but when you travel along there’s, there’s a lot of little things to see old farm buildings, little parks and little towns, little roadside stance and they’re all so easy to get to. 2 (4m 57s): So that’s really the first cool thing about Saskatchewan. The second really cool thing about Saskatchewan is the co-op and it’s like you can get excited about a grocery store, a gas station and the beer store all in one stop. And I think what’s really nice about the co-op, and I wish we had it in Ontario, is the service, the, the cleanliness, the selection, the friendliness, like all of it is just amazing and I wish we had it in Ontario and I miss the co-op. 1 (5m 25s): I will say for sure the co-op, like branded label food. Amazing. They’re Greek salad dressing like I still crave it to this day. Excellent, excellent grocery store chain. So good job Saskatchewan on your co-op. It’s 2 (5m 38s): The kind of place like when you’re traveling through an area and you don’t know where you’re gonna get groceries in that town and you’re wondering should we go here? Should we go there? And you just see a co-op sign, you’re just bang hit the co-op cuz they’ve got what we need and everything will be fine 1 (5m 50s): For sure. Officially Saskatchewan is known as the land of the living skies and that’s kind of what Dan was alluding to, that kind of dog river prairie views. I mean the skies are beautiful and they change a hundred times a day and you kind of never get the same view twice when you’re looking up. But other than that, there’s some things about Saskatchewan and if you’ve seen my Instagram post this week, you will find out. But there’s so much cool things that you would never think existed. Like did you know that there is a buoyant salt lake basically known as the Dead Sea of Canada in Saskatchewan. I have been there, it’s kind of incredible. It’s sort of in the middle of nowhere, not too far from Saskatoon at a little place called Little Manitou Lake and it’s near Watras Saskatchewan. 1 (6m 30s): So this is a place that is like a mineral spring. There’s healing waters you basically don’t sink when you’re in the lake. Pretty incredible stuff to find in the middle of the prairies. And if you’re interested in visiting the Salt Lake, there’s some great camping options, one of which is the Manitou and District regional park and that I’ve been here for work, it’s a great regional park, it has 108 fully serviced sites and there’s a ton of other variety of electric, non-electric sites, tent sites, et cetera. The prices range from 24 to $37 per night and this park has a pretty great playground. There’s a golf course, speech access for the lake, a perfect stopping point if you’re gonna spend a night or two and just kind of experience the healing waters I guess There’s also a pretty amazing set of sand dunes in Saskatchewan, which literally was such a surprise to me and probably the farthest thing to what you would think would be there. 1 (7m 21s): And that’s in Sand Dunes Provincial Park, which is amazing because it’s almost on the border between Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territory. So it’s that far north and if you see some of the pictures you can kind of Google it and look it up. It’s accessed by float plane. It looks like you are in the middle of the Sahara Desert or the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. So the point of all of this is that Saskatchewan is got such an incredible differing ecosystem from north the south, east, west, there’s grasslands, there’s boreal forests, there’s quicksand, there’s rattlesnakes, there’s cooley’s, there’s a bit of bad lands. Really take your time in this tiny little province to explore because you will find something for every taste. 1 (8m 5s): There’s a hundred thousand lakes. And actually I just found out the other day when I was looking, Saskatchewan actually has the most roads in Canada in the province really? And it’s one of the smallest provinces. Cool. Yeah. So our destination for Saskatchewan was Pike Lake Provincial Park and Pike Lake is located about 20 minutes outside of Saskatoon, just about 20 minutes south. The reason we chose this particular provincial park is one cuz it had great amenities and two, because it was so close to Saskatoon and I was still doing some work in and about this trip and visiting our office in Saskatoon. So with that I will sort of hand it over to Dan because he spent the majority of the time doing things in the park with the girls when I was at work. 2 (8m 46s): Yeah. So this was a really good chance for us to just relax. We didn’t leave the park, we rode our bikes around. So it’s a great spot to ride bikes really flat so if you’ve got little kids it’s not gonna be too strenuous or too physical for little kids to ride around. There’s shaded sites, there’s open sites, you know sites with privacy. I recall the firewood was free there, you just kind of had to back up and get some, so that was cool. The park offers various recreational opportunities for visitors including water activities, playgrounds, tennis pickleball, beach volleyball, courts, mini golf, an outdoor pool with a water slide, one and a half kilometer. So about a mile long nature trail that begins at the interpretive center. 2 (9m 29s): So there’s a lot to do. The girls and I went for a little bike ride, we rode over to the camp store near the beach, they had a a grill there. We got some eggs and bacon and pancakes and toast for breakfast like was really cheap and I didn’t have to cook so that was awesome. We took a, took a stroll on over to the mini golf and played mini golf for a bit. We rode our bikes, we hung out at the campsite, like just a really good spot to re-energize yourself and get your kids outside to play. So that was what was really cool about Pike Lake. So if you’re on a long road trip and you have that time where you think you need a day and a half to do nothing, good place to go. If you’re in Saskatchewan and you need a weekend destination, good spot to go. 1 (10m 7s): One thing I would say about Pike Lake is that it’s a really popular park for local day trippers. So we were there in the middle of the summer or I guess towards the end of the summer, but it was still August. Like I don’t think kids had gone back to school quite yet. The camping loops weren’t as busy as I expected them to be. But certainly it seems like the type of place where during the weekends in the summer you’re gonna get a ton of locals coming up to have picnics for the day, use the pool, all of those amenities that you would see. But the camping loop was actually, you know, there was still quite a few open spots left, which was nice. Like it was nice to have some time in a park that wasn’t just absolutely packed. I mean there’s 220 odd sites at the park so it is a big enough park. 1 (10m 48s): But definitely because of the local feel, I think you get some time where you feel like it’s just, it’s got great amenities but it’s, you’re not gonna be nose to nose with your neighbor. 2 (10m 56s): Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of, if you’re from Ontario, it’s a blend between a provincial park and a conservation area. Maybe the best of both worlds really. 1 (11m 4s): I went through and looked at some of our pictures and I, I did note when we came in that given the fact there’s 220 odd sites, there was only one dump station. Yeah. 2 (11m 15s): And I even then, I don’t really recall anything that was too crazy there. Water dump station, electricity, all what you would expected wasn’t really any challenges for us. We rolled in unhitched, set up in kind of half an hour, 40 minutes and we were good to go. 1 (11m 30s): One thing I will say too that I did note, which they did a fantastic job at is the walkway around the lake is fully accessible, it’s barrier free and there’s a barrier free playground as well. So if you are traveling with with kids or somebody who is differently abled, there’s a lot of opportunity to kind of participate in nature in that park as well, which I thought was really 2 (11m 50s): Good. Yeah. And I remember even it was kind of that summer evening and the, the, the sun was high in the sky kind of, well maybe not high in the sky. It was low in the sky and we actually just hopped a fence and walked down a country road and that was kind of cool too. 1 (12m 2s): I don’t think we hopped a fence, 2 (12m 4s): We hopped a fence honey, we hopped a fence and walked down a country road. I don’t, 1 (12m 8s): I don’t remember the fence hopping. 2 (12m 9s): We were rebels. 1 (12m 11s): Okay. I remember the country road, I don’t remember the fence helping but okay, I believe you. One of the things that is so great about Saskatchewan provincial parks that you don’t find in Ontario is the price. Literally all of these provincial parks are like 40% cheaper per night than you will find in an Ontario park, which is ridiculous and shocking and something I think probably Ontario should, should strive towards cause it’s actually getting quite expensive to camp here. So you know it for Apples app, apples to apples comparisons at Pike Lake for an electric site it’s $33, whereas a similar site in Ontario, just electric only your fif like 52, 50 $3. 1 (12m 52s): Let 2 (12m 52s): Me just jump on my soapbox here for a second. Cause Uhoh, we’ve covered a lot of real estate, put a lot of miles down the road and by far Ontario has some of the most expensive options for camping anywhere. We we, we went down Route 66 and you could stay for $25 a night at the side of the highway in a proper RV park with full hookups, which made it so much easier than boondocking. And we go to Saskatchewan and it’s free firewood and the parking, pardon me, the parking, the camping is less expensive. I listen to our podcast on Jasper and the firewood was free. I just boggles my mind that camping is so expensive in Ontario and I’m trying to figure out what makes it different. 2 (13m 32s): What do we get that makes it that much more money? 1 (13m 35s): Well I don’t think we get that much more, but it’s supply and demand. Like, you know how hard it is to find a camping spot. Like we book five months to the day out in Ontario and you can hardly find a spot. Like they’re all taken people book for the max. They can charge whatever they want because they’re always full. 2 (13m 50s): I guess it is. I guess what I’m calling for is more provincial parks in Ontario. 1 (13m 54s): Soapbox off. 2 (13m 55s): Sorry. 1 (13m 56s): Thanks Dan for that. And that was the middle-aged man. Grumpy minute. Maybe we will roll that in. We’ll roll a rant into the regular rotation. That’s Saskatchewan in a nutshell. Certainly we will be back out in future years to spend more time exploring. But I highly, highly encourage you, which is the point of this whole podcast is to really find something cool that you wouldn’t expect in a prairie province. Everything is there. So spend some time and look at Saskatchewan as a destination rather than a drive-through. 2 (14m 26s): A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I would go back to Saskatchewan in a heartbeat. 1 (14m 30s): With all of that being said, we kind of have one more stop that we took before we got home to Ontario and that was asip Provincial Park in Manitoba. And we wanted to loop around, we sort of looped around kind of northeast, went through Yorkton, Saskatchewan and over towards English Manitoba, which is where asip is. And we sort of wanted to do that as a loop, which is, you know, it’s like three and a half hours north of Winnipeg by that point. But we wanted to drive through that area specifically because of as provincial park, which has like ski hills and valleys and, and really just beautiful scenery. And then that’s also in the area of riding Mountain National Park, which is another really desirable area to kind of go and see. 1 (15m 10s): So we knew that this was going to be a drive-through because at that point we were kind of fighting the clock to get back home. And we did stay one night in Mississippi, really amazing scenery that you wouldn’t expect. Beautiful overlooks over the lake. And as Mississippi had one of those, when you ca kind of came around into the provincial park, do you remember? 2 (15m 27s): I do, I remember you’re, you’re starting to make that transition from the prairies to Northwestern Ontario. So the, the landscape is changing again, really a good nature based type of park. If I recall correctly. There was boating in there, obviously not, not something we were at for this particular trip. But really private sites, just a really nice park. Definitely a spot to go back to and spend a little bit more time and explore a little bit more. And then I remember the day that we left, it was kind of foggy, drizzly, there was a bit of a haze that was kind of cool as we’re getting on the road and we get going and then the trip just, we just kept trucking along really that day. Think we made it to Thunder Bay that night. Yeah. With some adventure. Yeah. 1 (16m 8s): Do we want to talk about the adventure? I feel like we need to, we need to put an asterisk on this story. We have spoken a lot in previous podcasts about our personal choice that when we travel long distances, depending on the weather outside, et cetera, we do choose to leave our propane on to run the fridge. And there’s a lot of debate out there, whether that’s that’s reasonable or not. You know, we certainly will, we’ll do both. We will kind of put ice packs in it and turn it off or we will leave the propane on and turn it on. So probably this is a cautionary tale of what, what can go wrong when you do this. Again, when we talk about our choice to leave this on, this is in no way advocacy for doing what we do. 1 (16m 49s): We’re just here to share our stories. But we did have a bit of an adventure with the propane. 2 (16m 54s): What, what happened folks, is that we stopped Molina’s kind of dancing around the issue cuz we’re embarrassed and it’s a good reason not to leave your propane on. So we stopped along the way. The girls had to use the washroom. We didn’t put the tip out out. Somebody wiggled into the washroom, they bumped the knob on the stove, the knob on the stove, propane got into the trailer, the trailer absolutely wreaked of propane. We didn’t realize that till 11 o’clock at night when we pulled into the Walmart parking lot in Thunder Bay and the entire thing stunk. So obviously turned the propane off air the place out, but we weren’t able to sleep on it that night. 1 (17m 26s): So this was six hours. So this was six hours of propane kind of spewing into the inside of our trailer, which could have been a disaster. It was not. And you know, listen, like years and years and years of leaving the propane on never had an issue. But again, one time you do and that’s when you have an issue. And propane doesn’t dissipate like natural gas, like it’s heavy, it settles. And so certainly we did not feel safe sleeping in there and that would not have been the good choice. However, the problem was we literally called every hotel in Thunder Bay and for whatever reason that weekend there was no availability. We could not find a hotel room. So we did sleep in the Walmart parking lot, however, for fully adult size human beings slept in the cab of our F-150. 2 (18m 9s): Yeah. So Dan slept in the driver’s seat reclined and he did not get a good sleep. Molina slept in the passenger seat reclined and she was grumpy. Ila slept on the floor of the truck and she got stuck in the morning. Fiona slept on the bench seat of the truck in the back and snored like a baby. She had the best sleep of anybody. This is a matter of personal pride at this point. At eight 30 in the morning, we pulled out of the Walmart parking lot in Thunder Bay and we live in the kitchen or Waterloo area and we made it back to our home base in the one shot all the way from Thunder Bay. 1 (18m 42s): So the original plan was to stop in Sudbury. However, once we got to Sudbury where we were like, Nope, it’s another four hours home, nobody wants to sleep in the trailer another night by this point we had already turned off the propane and we just thought, nope, we’re trucking, we’re trucking 2 (18m 56s): Home. You reach a point on a trip and let’s all admit it, you reach a point on a long trip where you just want to be home. And that’s the time that we just decided we all wanted to be home because we had been on the road for three weeks and we got home, we backed the trailer into the driveway at about one o’clock in the morning and we climbed into our own beds and we unpacked in the morning. And so ended the great road trip of 2021. 1 (19m 17s): Yeah. And the cautionary tale that no matter how long you’ve been doing this, you’ll still make mistakes and that’s okay. And just as long as nobody dies. 2 (19m 25s): Absolutely. 1 (19m 26s): From this point on, we’ve got lots of new content that we’re gonna be looking at, looking at, revealing some of our favorite places to stay with a little bit of a park overview, park recommendation format as well as I think I would like to probably dive into our recent trip just outside of San Diego and we can talk about some desert camping and some of the things that we saw there that we thought would be interesting to you 2 (19m 50s): All. Yeah, I think there’s that. I think I’ve kind of been keeping some notes on the corner of my desk about some RV maintenance issues that we could share, some kind of lessons learned, things that you want to ask when your trailer goes in for service, stuff like that. So we got lots of new ideas, but this is the culmination of the road trip kind of part of RVing, I think for our podcast this summer. 1 (20m 8s): So again, welcome to season three. We will be back in a couple of weeks with brand new content and thanks for sticking with us guys. 2 (20m 14s): Thank 1 (20m 15s): You. Okay, bye.