The poll is closed, the votes are in, and it’s … complicated! We had only four votes: two for East, one for North, and then one for Anywhere but East. The thing that complicates it is that I was the vote for Anywhere but East, and I kind of feel guilty for getting myself involved when the votes would otherwise trend East. So I’m going to do something I haven’t done yet and call executive power: we’re heading East! (It’s also the week of my girlfriend, Heather’s, birthday, and she wanted to go East after hearing where we were going) We’re off to Dinosaur Provincial Park!
As I mentioned, it’s Heather’s birthday this week; with all of the activities we have planned this week, we probably won’t make it to the Park until Saturday. In the meantime, do you have any thoughts on dinosaurs, or this part of Alberta? Good road trip songs? Leave it in the comments below, or share it on Facebook or Twitter with the #NSEW hashtag!
Wow, I’ve been derelict in my duties! I’ve been so busy that I didn’t have a chance to contact someone from Hussar, Alberta, and – unfortunately – there’s just not a lot more to find out about it on the Internet! So that means we’re going to get back on the series of tubes called the Internet and head in a different direction. Will we continue towards Nova Scotia? Head up towards the Northwest Territories and the North Pole? Continue hanging out in Canada’s Prairies? Your vote will help decide our next direction!
We’ll close this poll sometime during the weekend. As always, bonus points for leaving a comment letting us know why you’ve chosen the direction you did!
Hussar, Alberta, like our previous stops of Milo, Alberta, and Marlin, Washington, is infinitesimal in comparison to the wide open grasslands surrounding them. Hussar has a population of about 160 people, and – judging from what I can find via my Internet searches – they’ve only posted about seven photos of Hussar online.
Hussar's Park
For such a small village, they seem to have some pretty nice amenities – a high school, an ice rink/curling center, and a town park. If you read our post on Milo, Alberta, the idea that such a tiny community would have all this stuff should sound familiar. I’m not sure if it’s the case with Milo or not, but I found an answer to this that I wasn’t expecting: the community finances itself by volunteering at a casino. Or at least it did: members of Hussar’s community would volunteer at a casino in Calgary in order to take a cut of the profits, but that casino has since shut down. If you read the article I linked to, you’ll see that they generated a surprising amount of revenue for themselves doing this. I should point out that volunteering at casinos is not the town’s economic base; like a lot of smaller communities, it’s agriculture.
In learning about Hussar, I was curious about its name, specifically what it had to do with Prussian light calvary. The area was initially settled by loose bands of cattle ranchers in the late 1800s, but at some point around 1910, a company of German immigrants – most of them former army officers – bought a lot of the land, took up farming, and named it after the Hussars of the German army. When World War I broke out, many of these immigrants left Hussar in an effort to return to – and fight for – Germany, but they were all detained. Ownership of the Germans’ eventually went to other local families, but the Hussar name stuck.
That’s about all I have for you for Hussar. I’ve found a “Hussar” group on Facebook, so maybe I can find a citizen to tell us a little more about the town, but we’ll have to wait and see.
One thing that I can tell you about Hussar, though, is that they’ve got a pretty good history of themselves available on-line (case in point: this page), which is something that a lot of other communities lack. When I first started #N?S?E?W? out, I was intrigued by the challenge of seeing how much I could find out about a place, just by poking around online – remote-seeing, if you will. Really, that’s the heart of this project: using our current technologies to tour a place as faithfully as we can. A few of the posts I’ve written have fooled people into thinking that I was actually in their town, hanging out and finding out what I could. No, I’m still here in Portland, Oregon, at my dining room table. I’m using teleportation. I’m using virtual reality. I’m using Google Streetview. Anyway, it’s been really interesting to me to find what is – or isn’t – available about different cities online, and one of the things that I am surprised by is that sometimes there’s a lot more information about a smaller community more readily available than in larger communities. Anyway.
Thoughts on Hussar? More knowledge than I’m dropping? Suggestions for road trip music as we travel through the Prairies of Alberta? As always, leave it in the comments!
We’ve closed this round of polling, and our resulting direction is East! East is going to take us to the town of Hussar, Alberta. We only had six votes this time: three for East, two for West (one of those was mine), and one for South. No one voted for North, but if that was the direction that we were voted in, we would have gone to Innisfail, Alberta. Leading votes for South would have taken us to Claresholm, Alberta, while a winning West choice would have landed us in Banff, Alberta.
Does anyone know anything about Hussar, Alberta? Ever heard of it before? Have any suggestions for virtual road trip music? Let us know in the comments!
