Sometimes it takes getting away from home for awhile to truly appreciate some of the great things we have at home.I recently travelled to Europe for a holiday, and though places like Paris and London have lots going for them - especially when it comes to history and art - there are some things that Saskatchewan has that they don't.First, and most noticeably, there's space.We have so much space here, it's truly incredible, especially after you've ridden with four other people in a tiny British elevator.Our streets - especially our Main Streets - are far wider than most parking lots we came across in our travels. And you can walk for miles in this province without bumping into a single person, which is something that can't be said about Paris, with its tiny, tiny sidewalks and millions of people.We mentioned to some of the people we met from England that our home province of Saskatchewan has about a million people in a space at least double the size of Great Britain (upon research, I found Saskatchewan is 651,036 square kilometres in size, while Great Britain is 229,899 square kilometres, making Saskatchewan almost three times the size), they had trouble imagining that. The Londoners, especially, had a hard time with it, as there are about 11 million people who live within the confines of that single city. (They also had a hard time understanding what we were saying when we said "Saskatchewan." The most common response was "Bless you.")Secondly, when it comes to traffic, no matter how much we complain about it, we are incredibly lucky here. I tried to figure out the rules of the road in Paris, and finally concluded that there are just a few guidelines: Go when you can, and if you think you might be able to squeeze your vehicle in somewhere, try it, even if it means you're perpendicular to the flow of traffic.And the roads here - they're straight! It doesn't look like a toddler took a pencil, scribbled a bunch of lines, then had the government base a road system on it. My prairie-hard-wired brain really had difficultly with the fact that no roads went straight from point A to point B in the part of England we visited. Every road needed to have curves - many, many curves - and no ditches. If you go off the road in England, you hit a big tree. There's no shoulder to even give you a little leeway. It makes driving - and riding in - vehicles pretty stressful, actually.There are things, transportation-wise, that we could learn from our European neighbours. Their public transportation systems are fantastic. There are trains, buses, subway systems, and an army of taxis, ready to take you where you need to go. And they are all easy to use. There's no need to own a car, something that's unthinkable in this province, where buses are pretty much nonexistent in the rural areas, and subways are beyond comprehension in the cities. That's likely because of the first thing I mentioned Saskatchewan has that these places don't - space. There's simply too much space to cover and not enough people to either justify, or pay, for it.But it's something we should keep in mind, for the future, as our population grows. For at some point in history, the European nations were in the same boat as us, and look where they are now. We're lucky, really - we can learn from them, and their mistakes, and build cities that are not only steeped in history and art, but are easy to navigate, especially for those who like straight lines.
