It's a full hour's drive, much of it along a major local highway and the balance along back-country roads to arrive from our home within the outskirts of the city to our daughter's rural home which just happens to be on the opposite end to ours of the city outskirts. It is a pleasant enough drive, but the older we get, the more interminable it seems.

At this time of year we're always surprised to see how high and mature farmers' crops have grown, and take turns trying to guess what they are; oats, soybeans, potatoes, and of course corn which is fairly self-identifiable.

Some of the drive is spectacular, passing the rapids of the Mississippi, driving over a historic old stone bridge, famous in its time for forward-looking building technology, with its five large spans, now merely quaintly picturesque and inadequate for modern-day traffic.

And the amazing proliferation of wildflowers growing alongside the highway medians always take our attention for their colourful vigour and variety. We take turns identifying what they are; buttercups, daisies, purple loosestrife, viper's bugloss, Queen Anne's lace, lupins, clover, and all manner of tall ornamental grasses. And, of course, milkweed, beloved of Monarch butterflies, is now in bloom.

We see ducks in flight, and vultures soaring overhead, and occasionally come across wild turkeys with their large awkward shapes picking through the underbrush at the side of the forest burgeoning on either side of the back roads leading to the start of the geography known as the Canadian Shield.