Can you think of anyone who takes a week vacation and not stay in a hotel or a resort, but instead spends a week doing work on a farm? Of course, that would be me. Spending a week in the outskirts of Saskatoon was certainly a unique and rewarding experience. Most people had stunned reactions when I told them where I was staying for a week. Just think of life in the wild west or Little House on the Prairie with modern and not so modern technology. Yes, that is what I experienced for a week: trimming the grass with a John Deere while wearing cover-alls, operating a grain swather, repairing a combine, picking crab apples from the trees, or digging ripe vegetables to be cooked later for dinnertime. The farm is actually located what used to be called Tarnopol which is now void of a town hall and town council and at least a 1 ½ hour drive from Saskatoon with the nearest town located at least a ½ drive to the nearest town of Wakaw if you need to do grocery shopping. Asking for InterNet service is just as laughable as asking for ice water in a saloon 100 years ago. At least there was a telephone (an old-fashioned wall-mounted rotary phone). The roads between farms and towns usually have no traffic. Although the road maps of Saskachewan include numbered highways, not all these highways are actually paved. In fact a number of these registered highways are gravelled due to lack of heavy traffic. Since little villages are a good driving distance from each other, still all the country folk know each other, so don’t be surprised if a cluster of people in one town know a cluster of people in the next town. Such is the rural life. However, vacationing on a farm helped me understand and appreciate the hard work our farmers do. I witnessed how they put their hearts and souls into their work and how much pride they have in doing their work. There’s no such thing as being finished for the day. Farm work is never done; it’s just unscheduled. Even if you complete your days work of milling acres of wheat and canola, several acres of land pop out of nowhere and need tending to.  One thing I did not experience was feeding livestock since there was none on the farm. But I did get informed on how much work it took to maintain livestock. It is also quite a task; you need to constantly produce feed because the animals need to eat. Out of all this, it doesn’t really mean I was urging to get home fast to the city life. In spite of all the lengthy hard work, I never felt any mental stress whatsoever, meaning it was good to get away from the city life for a while and away from sitting in my office and dealing with paperwork all day. It was worth spending time in the fresh air and living off the land. My friends invited me to return sometime, and I gladly accepted to go back again soon.

So if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty and just simply letting yourself go without worrying about your appearance and washing up too frequently, you’ll certainly find a farm vacation a lot of fun. Stay tuned as I have more to mention on other events on this trip and I have pictures to follow on my next upcoming farm article.