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<\/a><\/p>\nI saw these giant wheat sculptures in the town of Weyburn. I thought they were fitting for Saskatchewan – Canada’s breadbasket.<\/p>\n
I pulled into the campground in Estevan. Cousin Kelly told me that most golf courses in that part of Canada also had campgrounds. When I checked in, I found proof that the campground was at a golf course.<\/p>\n
It made me think of something that my father would have done. He was always thinking!<\/p>\n Speaking of things that my father would have done, I am sure he would have made a fire pit out of a washing machine drum, too.<\/p>\n The campground had a lovely water feature, too.<\/p>\n As nice as the campground was, it wasn’t the reason I was visiting Estevan. I had a friend that I met though an internet group so long ago that it was even before Facebook! I left the group we met on, but we met up again on Facebook. When it looked like I was heading to her neck of the woods, we made plans to meet up.<\/p>\n She came over to meet me at the campground. It was good to finally meet her, face-to-face.<\/p>\n I had always heard of needing to plug in engine block heaters because it got so cold up there, but I had never seen a car with a plug before. I had to capture this shot.<\/p>\n Jackie did a great job showing me around Estevan, which has a similar history to New Norway. The first settlers arrived with the Canadian Pacific Railway at the end of the 1800s and it became a town in 1906. It achieved the status of a city in 1957, which in Saskatchewan is a community of 5,000 or more. Estevan is the eighth largest city in Saskatchewan.<\/p>\n In addition to transportation and grain, Estevan is known for its energy resources.<\/p>\n Lignite Louie is the town’s mascot. There are a lot of lignite mines in the area. Lignite is sometimes called brown coal. It is a kind of halfway between peat and bituminous coal. If you want to know more about that, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The area is also rich in oil and gas. They have an interesting display of the pieces of equipment that get the oil from the ground to people.<\/p>\n There is the pump jack,<\/p>\n the header,<\/p>\n and the separator. In the end, the oil finds its way to the tanks. I like how they incorporated it into the gateway to the town. Welcome to Estevan!<\/p>\n We stopped by a community center.<\/p>\n Judging by the mosaics on the outside, it might just be an art centre.<\/p>\n The people of Estevan have an appreciation for art and community involvement.<\/p>\n Jackie took me to visit the Estevan Court house, which was the last court house designed by Saskatchewan’s provincial architect, Maurice Sharon. It was completed in 1930.<\/p>\n On one corner of the property, there is a unique memorial to World War II veterans.<\/p>\n In 2015, a 102-year-old dying tree was carved by Albertan sculptor\u00a0Darren Jones.<\/a><\/p>\n The details are amazing.<\/p>\n You can really spend a lot of time looking at all the images the artist chose to include.<\/p>\n I like the poppies. That is a nod to World War I and the poem “In Flanders Fields”<\/a> by Canadian poet, John McCrae.<\/p>\n Every side has interesting details. Too bad the bright sun made some of them hard to take photos of.<\/p>\n But, where the sun hit the carving, you could really appreciate his work.<\/p>\n Sometimes I think people are under the impression that Canadians sit around politely sipping tea and saying, “Pardon me.” This memorial commemorates a time when the miners struck for better wages and working conditions. They call this event Black Tuesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n Three strikers were killed in 1931 when the local police, assisted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, confronted a strikers’ parade in front of the Court House.\u00a0 I find it interesting that the sources I found refer to the deaths at the hands of the law enforcement officers as “murders.”<\/p>\n A Royal Commission met to investigate the causes of the strike.\u00a0Twenty people were charged as a result of their findings.<\/p>\n Apparently, the only person who was convicted was Annie Butler, a union organizer. She was sentenced to one year of hard labour and a $500 fine.<\/p>\n We continued on to the Souris Valley Museum, which documented the history of the area.<\/p>\n Much ingenuity was required to make it out on the frontier. This machine is a wool carder.<\/p>\n There were lots of old-timey machines.<\/p>\n I enjoyed puzzling over the machines. What could they be used for? I decided that this was a cream separator – but I could be wrong.<\/p>\n What do you do with a beautiful old firetruck? Put it in a museum, of course!<\/p>\n They don’t make them like this anymore.<\/p>\n Of course, sometimes the way they were made required some tinkering. I like the way someone figured out how\u00a0to add tank treads to the rear wheels on the tractor.<\/p>\n They had an old school house on display, complete with a list of teachers who taught there.<\/p>\n You might notice that there was only one teacher listed for each year. Yes, it was a one-room school house.<\/p>\n I found it interesting\u00a0that one of the teachers was educated in Michigan. It makes me wonder what brought them out here.<\/p>\n We had a picture of my mother at her school in New Norway that reminds me of this picture. I wonder if she attended school in a one-room school house. I wish I could remember. Just a hint, friends, if you still have the opportunity to ask your parents questions, ask them. Then write the answers down!<\/p>\n Outside the museum, they had some of the modern equipment they use in mining these days.<\/p>\n This dragline bucket can dig up 43 cubic yards at a time.<\/p>\n Can you imagine pulling that bucket through the soil with this piece of equipment? I would call it a crane, but there is probably a more technically correct name.<\/p>\n Right across the street was a large modern grain elevator. Saskatchewan – Canada’s bread basket!<\/p>\n With our tourism completed for the day, we stopped off for some refreshment at another Canadian institution – Tim Hortons! We had to rest up for the next day’s adventures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I set out from Moose Jaw, with my eyes set on Estevan. I passed a lot of prairie along the way. Every now and then, I’d pass through a town. I saw these giant wheat sculptures in the town of Weyburn. I thought they were fitting for Saskatchewan – Canada’s breadbasket. I pulled into the … Continue reading Exploring Estevan, Saskatchewan<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[898,899,895,897,896],"class_list":["post-10985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-black-tuesday","tag-dragline-bucket","tag-estevan","tag-estevans-soldiers-tree","tag-lignite-louie"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10985"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11092,"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10985\/revisions\/11092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
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