We have arrived!

Well, we made it. We are now at our summer home at Sturgeon Lake Regional Park in the middle of Saskatchewan, Canada where we are the campground managers for the next five months!

First impressions? It's going to be a great summer!

The little blue car did a fantastic job on our long drive. We spent $80 getting an exhaust pipe fixed, $352 worth of fuel, and $76 in Mexican road toll fees to drive 4,500 kms (2,790 miles).

That was a long drive!

The last bit of our drive was fairly short. We only had to do 185 kms (115 miles) and we got an early start, saying goodbye to Mark and Jean just after 9:00am. Thanks for having us guys, we enjoyed finally meeting you and hope to see you this summer!

185 kms (115 miles) from Saskatoon to the campground.

Funny things we saw along the way!

The snow is melting!

We're getting close! Still 22 kms (14 miles) to go from this turn off.

I had thought this was going to be a dirt road, but happy to see it was paved!

Our first view of Sturgeon Lake!

We're here!

The road leading down to the campground.

We got there just before 12 noon. A few members of the board were at our "cabin" doing some finishing touches, so we said hello to everyone and got acquainted. There's still a little bit of work to do, but they've painted the whole interior and cleaned things up nicely. Apparently it's been a while since anyone lived here and they've done a lot of work over the past week making it livable.

Only problem right now? The water lines are still frozen! So we've got no running water. The boss had offered to let us stay at his place for a few days, but we've been living out of other peoples houses for over three weeks now and we were really looking forward to staying in a place we can call our own.

Oh, one more problem. The furnace wouldn't fire up yesterday. It's only two years old, and they've already had it running, but it stopped yesterday. They called a furnace guy who said he would be out in an hour and a half or so.

We needed to stock up. We had a look around and saw what was here. But there were still a few things we needed, as well as stocking the shelves and refrigerator with food. We had bought quite a bit of food, along with some specialty gluten free items along the way, but we needed much more. We're essentially setting up home from scratch here. So we figured out what we needed and set off for the city of Prince Albert, about a 35 minute drive from here.

53 kms (31 miles) to the city of Prince Albert (pop 35,000).

First stop was the Salvation Army thrift store. We picked up an electric kettle, a crock pot, some baking pans, a casserole dish, and a can opener. Total cost was going to be $15.50. We got to the cash and they said they were renovating and everything was 50% off! So our bill for all that stuff was $7.75. And no tax. Nice.

Then it was off to Walmart where we spent $166! Most of that was groceries, but we also needed some bedding and a nice small fry pan. I'm sure there is other stuff we'll need, but anything else will have to wait a week or so for our next trip to town.

Arriving back at "the cabin", we found that the furnace man had arrived and we had heat! So the only thing we're missing now is running water. They had left us with a fresh 5 gallon jug of drinking water, but we'll have to figure something out.

Hooked up our "MiFi" internet device and you can see by reading this blog that it worked perfectly. Actually totally impressed with the speed considering we're in the middle of nowhere!

We had a short meet and greet meeting with the board of directors here at the campground. Everyone seems very nice and I'm sure we'll get along fine. We'll tell you more about the campground and the park in another post.

Our "cabin" is actually a two bedroom house. It's quite nice and we're totally happy with it. We'll show you the interior once we get it finished and all set up.

Our first sunset at Sturgeon Lake.