Chinese Broccoli

May 27: EDMONTON TO SASKATOON

[How did I forget to mention the Edmonton post-show smoothie party?]

So last night in Edmonton I found out that Rob, the merch dude for Dinosaur, used to be employed by Michigan's finest joke-rap band, the Insane Clown Posse. I share this news with the others and Derek says that ICP rule and that when they tour they bring 4 semi trucks worth of Faygo with them.

I decide this morning to try and offset some of the bad tour lifestyle habits (...potato chips are a vegetable, right?) and grab an early morning swim at the Edmonton YMCA. It's pretty near the hotel, so I'm psyched to go—only I get changed and end up waiting, in my swimsuit, in the locker room, for 20 or 30 minutes, waiting for them to open up the pool. Eventually it turns out the lifeguard didn't manage to uh, make it in on Sunday morning (maybe he or she was one of those wild drunk dreadlocked goths outside on the street with us at 3:00am?) and furthermore, the person's phone number isn't even in service anymore, and no one will open up the pool! I entreat the desk attendant to make up for this by letting me into the Membership Plus changerooms so I could at least have a sauna or a whirlpool—but he won't, because "then I'd have to do that for everybody". I end up having a much crappier shower than I would had I just stayed at the Mariott. So much for healthy living. Anyway, guy at the Edmonton City Centre YMCA: I hate you.

10:45 We hit the road for Saskatchewan! Albeit a little late.

11:15: Three buffalo by the side of the road.

1:00: Hungry and still not having eaten all day, we stop to get food in Fuck All, Alberta. There is a Pizza Hut and an A&W and a new-mown grassy median, and not much else. The suspicious teen at A&W informs me there will be a three day wait on my veggie patty, so I am outta luck with the Swiss Veggie Burger Combo Meal. I order a poutine and eat it outside in the wind and get gravy in my hair.

2:39 CST (or so we think): We enter Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. Another new province collected. Lloydminster seems to be about the equivalent of Aberdeen, South Dakota.
The radio station here is THE GOAT 106.9FM.
Lots of the hotels in this part of the world have waterslides.
I see a Subway sandwich shop that clearly used to be a KFC/Scott's Chicken Villa. At the same time, Michael sees both a rainbow flag and a confederate flag.

At some point I wake up from a dream inspired by the reggae Michael is playing and he and I start discussing the Canadian provinces while everyone else is sound asleep.

Michael: Is there an acronym to remember the names of all the provinces by?
Liz: Is there one for remembering all 50 states?
[Davey suddenly wakes up from slumber and recites all 50 states in alphabetical order.]
Liz: Wow.
Davey: I know my freedom.

Around what I think is 5:30pm, we roll into Saskatoon. I hop out of the car, hoping to make it to what appears to be Saskatoon's fanciest espresso bar before it closes at 6. I walk a little bit to get there and immediately fall in love with Saskatoon. It's all wide and vast and kind of '70s mothballed and sunwashed; for some reason the downtown manages to look both abandoned and yet thriving at the same time, and there's just a certain something about the sky.

I walk along the banks of the South Saskatoon River to the Mendel Art Gallery, a slightly inconceivable and great free arts centre that happens to have a) a fucking rad David Geary and Yuka Yamaguchi exhibit going on in the basement, and, inexplicably, a LaMarzocco GB5 dispensing 49th Parallel Epic espresso at the hand of Western Canada's most controversial barista, Jimmy O. I notice that the time is actually still Mountain Time and not Central, a mistake all of Awesome Color and Dinosaur seem to have made based on either the fallibility of road atlases or the stubbornness of Saskatooners. This allows me to spend a full hour drinking coffee and bullshitting, which is pretty alright, and I even have an Americano, which if you know me is actually pretty strange behaviour. In any case, can I just reiterate that I'm in the middle of freakin Saskatoon and I'm drinking 49th Parallel off of a LaMarzocco at 6:00pm on a Sunday? Can someone explain to me why I can't do this in Toronto, please?

Completely cranked on caffeine, I wander back out through the gallery and into Kinsmen Park.

At the park I see what appears to be a miniature Canadian Pacific train.

Liz: Hello, do you have a tiny train?
Park staff: Yes.
Liz: Can I ride on it?
Park staff [looks at me quizzically]: Yes you can.
Liz: How much will that be?
Park staff [looks at me with a mixture of pity and amusement]: $1

I sit on the train alone in the rain for awhile until I am joined by actual children. The miniature train does two loops around the park—through not a whole lot, mostly lilac bushes, past a game of softball, and through an Alice in Wonderland-themed tunnel—and then we return to the station. It rules almost as hard as the time I rode the tiny Amtrak train alone around Zilker Park in Austin, one trip before they shut it down forever. But I digress.

Back downtown, I kill time before the show hanging out backstage, occasionally sticking my laptop out the window to try and get the wireless signal from the Irish bar across the street. So I'm an addict. So what?

Outside, the sky is an unbelievable kind of electric-cerulean blue, rippling with clouds and so expansive and unending. I want to catch up on my email, watch bands, eat dinner, etc., but instead I run back for my camera and take a walk down to the end of 2nd Avenue South, to where there's a chain-link fence and some boards of lumber and a bunch of parking lots, and the whole thing is truly beautiful. It's just so open and glowing, and something about the way the sidewalks sit in such comfortable silence from their opposite sides of the wide western street, the way the neon and dust and sodium vapour kick up a kind of honeyed glow across this bruised downtown—I feel liberated and located, a strange sense of identity and connection in the middle of this slur of groggy travel and awful food and short-sleeping and that general sense of abstraction from everything back in the "real" world. I don't know what you've got, Saskatoon. But it's got me.