Prairie backroads, summer thunderstorms and grass as far as the eye can see, that was today.

An initial stint this morning on Highway 1 brought us into the town of Medicine Hat and an opportunity to get some groceries, take a nice walk along the bank of the Saskatchewan River at Police Point Park and finally get some internet at a Starbuck.

Medicine Hat seemed like a pleasant prosperous community.

A little east of town we headed south on Hwy 41. We plan to spend the next couple of days on minor roads rather than the tedium of the Trans Canada.

As we travelled south the gray lightly overcast day turned into a ragging rain storm, the roads deteriorated into gravel and the grass lands stretched to the sky in every direction. In this part of the country much of the land seems to be given over to grazing and growing of winter feed. We saw rolls of recently cut hay every where. The grazing land is interspersed with wheat and a little canola.

About 6:00pm we simply pulled off the road onto a convenient patch of grass, by then the storms had moved away and were simply dark clouds on the eastern horizon decorated with a double rainbow.

The beast (we have not yet agreed on a name for the Unimog-GXV) handled the gravel roads well.