Do you know BlackBerry’s don’t work in Regina, Saskatchewan? At least mine doesn’t, according to my provider. So I am going without access to my emails, which is very annoying to me and those people I keep calling every time a thought pops into my head.

I am up in Regina (home of Derek Boogaard and recently-re-signed Josh Harding), by the way, because my colleague, photographer Carlos Gonzalez, and I are working on a story on Wild bruiser Derek Boogaard and kid bro Aaron, who run a hockey fight camp here in their hometown for children.

Tonight, the Boogeyman Bros. will actually be boxing each other at a local gym, which Carlos and I have generously been invited to.

It’s been quite the adventure already. We decided to fly into Minot, North Dakota, and drive 4 1/2 hours northwest to Regina.

I have to admit, before a few days ago, I never even heard of Minot. We arrived at midnight last night, pulled in to Gate 1 (as opposed to Gate 2), rented a car, got lost immediately, and finally found our hotel in downtown Minot, population like 20.

This morning, bright and early, we hopped back in the car, battled traffic through Minot (it took at least four minutes), passed a couple cool joints, like the Klub, which seemed to be a pretty bustling place, and headed toward Canada.

Carlos has got a pretty eclectic music collection, so he popped in his iPod and off we went on our two-lane road trek.

Northern North Dakota is pretty flat. There’s nothing but farms and prairies and oilfields and more farms. Mostly, there were huge, bright yellow farms everywhere. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen. Carlos said they had to be mustard farms. I didn’t believe him, so I googled “yellow crops north dakota” and found out Carlos was right, which angered me.

I asked Carlos if he thought they were Dijon mustard farms or yellow. He said they were honey mustard farms. The laughs kept coming, as you can imagine. Here’s a picture of me in one of those fields.

Also interesting, we passed several nuclear missile sites dispersed throughout North Dakota. They’re fenced in and kept inside hardened silos. The first couple we saw were guarded by armed military officers in SUV’s. The last couple we saw were not. We’re hoping those were some of the decommissioned ones from recent treaty’s.

The first picture is next to L10 near Mohall, ND. The second picture is when I got too close.

Much apologies!

We continue and arrived at the Portal Entry to pass into Canada. The Canadian customs officer was very excited to hear we were heading north to do a story on the Boogeyman.

Immediately, Carlos showed his Canadian ignorance when I started whining that I had a hankering for some Tim Hortons coffee. He asked, “What’s Tim Hortons?” I exploded with shock and soon stopped for some.

An hour into Canada, after passing scores of coal mines, we hit Yellow Grass, Sask., (street map below) which had to be a half-mile long with like seven houses. Entering the city, it read, “Welcome to Yellow Grass, home of Peter Schaefer,” who plays for the Ottawa Senators. There was not a mention of Schaefer’s younger brother, Nolan, the Wild’s new goaltender in Houston.

That should make for some sibling rivalry.

As I sped past several slow moving vehicles that had no right to be driving, we finally made it into Regina, where we immediately became lost. We checked into our very nice hotel, met for some lunch, where the waitress asked Carlos if he wanted some vinegar. “And what would I put that on?” Carlos asked. “Your fries!” the woman screamed.

Again, Carlos is not fully aware yet about life up in Canada. Wait till he hears that Canadians use “phone” as a verb.

That’s it for now. Talk to you after boxing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.