SASKATCHEWAN - Prairies and Small Towns

Coming in to Kenaston - from the csr.  The folks of Kenaston SK are very proud of  their grain elevators and sad that they are being replaced by concrete models.  You can buy posters of them.  In one town, the elevator has been moved to a museum - on a trailer with 83 wheels.  The Dauphin Museum book tells me this.

Kenaston 

Saskatchewan was all wide open spaces - rolling grain fields and big skies.  We deliberately kept off the beaten track and avoided the large commercial centres.

The main street of Springside.  Springside Fine Foods was everything - petrol station, coffee shop, grocery store and washrooms.  They looked after us well and gave us free souvenirs when we left.

The towns we passed through were small, dominated by the grain elevators and tractor sales.  They gave a broad main street with few open shops and even fewer people.  I imagine that large farms which would once almost have been small villages, are increasingly mechanised and computerised, employing fewer and fewer people.  In one town the pharmacy also offered liquor outlet and newsagency services - and the local "restaurant" if there is one looks pretty run down.  Their saving grace may be that, since there seem to be no public toilets anywhere in Canada, passersby have to buy coffee to use their facilities.  Most have a small museum with a homemade sign and not enough volunteers.

The post office lady in the Nokomis Museum gave me quite a scare!!

If this sounds critical it isn't.  For my part we seemed to pass through Saskatchewan all too quickly.  The part of me that recognises mid western NSW as home, absolutely loved it.  In all that wide open space I feel I can breath deeply - and absolutely everywhere we have gone, we have been greeted with warmth and kindness.

By the by - we are generally finding accommodation a lot more expensive than expected, although it seems to be settling down to something more reasonable as we reach Ontario ... but even here, as tonight, we have hit a town where everthing is booked out and prices are at a premium again.  AND we have added an otter, scootling across the road on short legs, to our animal sightings.

ALBERTA - Badlands, Dinosaurs & Hoodoos

Hoodoos!!   

As we hit Alberta, the land flattened out to rolling hills & prairies - but we had some very specific things to see in this province.  We were there for the Badlands ... the eroded valleys of the Hoodoos - mysterious eroded rock forms, where the combination of softer sedimentary rock with harder intrusions has created capped pillars, stacked pillars, holes & shapes like lava flows.  Indian people saw faces in the rocks and regarded these "Badlands" as places of especial spiritual importance.

Writing on Walls Provincial Park - site of Canadian Aboriginal pictographs & spiritual significance.

At "Writing on the Walls" Provincial Park, down the south of the Alberta, we decided on a guided tour for an interpretation of the markings and introduction to the startling environment.  The native American pictographs can be dated with surprising specificity, in spite of the confusing overlay of modern graffiti.  In once instance the depiction of Model T Fords has been tracked down to a very specific occasion in the 1920s - other carvings high up are known to be many hundreds of years old.

We then moved north to Dinosaur Park ... where, in another eroded dry river valley, the most amazing complete Dinsosaur skeletons and other fossils have been discovered.  

Dinosaur Provincial Park - site of amazing finds.  Work is ongoing.

Many of these finds are now on exhibition at either the museum at Dinosaur Park, or at the mecca for lovers of paleontology, the Royal Tyrell Museum at Drumheller (pronounced 'tie-rell" I discovered).  Apart from the fossils themselves, a highlight for was the opportunity to watch and talk to students cleaning bones - and the view into the big laboratory.  I don't know where this museum gets its funding, but everything is beautifully exhibited and explained, especially the stories about finding and extracting some of the spectacular fossils.

Death throes of a tyrannosaur, set in stone, at the Royal Tyrell Museum.  It was the second incredible find by the same staff member in two years, and was removed as a single slap - with great difficulty.

Opalised ammonite fossil - about 50cms diameter and absolutely stunning!!  I want one!!!

As we drove out of the town of Drumheller, the scenery continued to amaze.  It is difficult to do justice verbally or photograhically to such an awe inspiring landscape.

(PS - if you double click on the pictures, they will enlarge)

Rockies and British Columbia

Well - Dear Friends ... it feels like we are driving across the large folded maps which Alvin spends so much time perusing - and it takes me back to 3rd class in Grenfell, when I first learned about the Canadian provinces.  Lurking in the background as we travel through the map is the image of an old fashioned class room with wrought iron framed desks, ink wells and roll up maps.

The attractive face of Vancouver, from near Pacific Regional Park.  The Park foreshore was covered
 large granite pebbles and huge driftwood logs.  I picked up a piece of fossilised timber.

Our two night stay in Vancouver were a bit of a washout.  Apart from the pleasant waterfront Pacific Spirit Regional Park, which we happened across as we drove in, all we saw was more traffic and crowds in maze like shopping malls.   I was desperate to replace my camera battery charger but it was a lost cause.  The replacement "univeral charger" has universally refused to recharge any battery of any kind, which I suppose is even handed!!  I am grateful for Alvin's camera.  In hindsight, we could have done with some more R&R before we hit the big smoke with the car.  Our one Airbnb accommodation, in the hills on the far east side of Vancouver was lovely - but we were not in a good frame of mind to enjoy it.

Heading out of Vancouver to the east, we passed through the gloriously lush Okanagan valley, famous for its orchards, without buying a single cherry - because we had stocked in Vancouver ... and famous for its little historic towns, but we passed them all by.  It seemed that we always stopped in souless concrete convenience centres for plastic food because of our need for the petrol / food / toilet combination.  Further east on the prairies, that has improved because there are no big convenience centres on the roads we have travelled in the past few days ... yea!!

I thought we would have our chance for the Okanagen experience when we stopped for the night at Osyoos - but I had that very wrong.  Osyoos is a desert town, a taste of Mexico in the "garden of Eden".    It looked okay from a distance, but close up it was expensive and tacky and in full holiday mode.  Excited anklebiters in their swimmers at every turn.

The attractive face of Osyoos - from a distance

We didn't really start to enjoy ourselves until we got to the Rockies - we stayed two nights in a little town called Kimberly and did a day trip loop up to Lake Louise and round back through Golden.  It was a long, long day - but worth it.  The Rockies lived up to their name.  They were really truely rocky and absolutely magnificent ... at every turn, and even as they faded into the distance as we headed for Alberta ....  and the peaks were replaced on the skyline by windmills.

Lake Louise was teaming with tourists, but otherwise we had our other mountain stops almost to ourselves.

En route we have seen a black bear scampering across the road right in front of our car (I bet his mother was cross!), two bison in a field just as I was telling Alvin they were extinct (!!), one dead deer type animal to prove that the graphic road signs tell it like to is, and one squirrel performing for the customers in a golf club ... (we do get really desperate for the coffee/toilet opportunities sometimes).

This stuffed grizzly was the feature display at the Kimberly local museum, along  with the story of the boy who shot the bear to save his friends.

Last views of the Rockies from the Petrol Station & Convenience Centre, shared by an army of Recreational Vehicles ...

Victoria, British Columbia

Well, we survived our journey and have now been three days in Canada.  The flight was uneventful, except that the embroidery project, which generally makes a long flight a pleasure for me, did not make it into my onboard bag - result, 15 hours of boredom!!  Actually, that pretty much set something of a pattern.  I also overlooked the laptop charger when I packed the laptop, and left my camera battery and charger at the last motel!!

Victoria, the capitol of British Columbia, is a delightful, human scale city on Vancouver Island, a short ferry ride (1.5 hours) or - in our case - an extremely short flight (15 minutes) from the city of Vancouver.  In peak summer, the weather was absolutely perfect ... sparkling colours, warmth moderated by a fresh breeze.  The harbour glistened, brilliantly coloured flower balls hung from every lamp post & building and decorative young Russian sailors from a tall ship, wearing gold braided pantomine suits, wandered around the foreshore.  We found a seafood restaurant serving seafood chowder and halibut so good we had to go back a second night.

Yesterday we  - and several thousand other tourists - visited the famous Butchart Gardens, on the outskirts of Victoria.  They were in their full summer garb, wearing vibrant colours against a background of rich and varied greens.  I thought that the creators of the garden were very lucky to have found such a dramatic location, until I realised that the Butchart family had inadvertently created the landscape themselves ... they made their money from manufacturing cement, and the garden is built over their original quarry and factory site.  Shows what you can do with determination ... and a small fortune!!

Now with a car bearing Quebec number plates (which has tickled Alvin's sense of humour), we are on our way across Canada.  First stop, Vancouver.  The ferry ride was a real pleasure but the drive through Vancouver (and by accident right down the main pedestrian shopping mall!!) caused Alvin's hair to turn a degree whiter.  There were a few things we intended to go back to visit, but we have thought better of it ... if it is on the other side of Vancouver, too late!!

The Journey

In August 2011 Robyn and Alvin are setting off on our first expedition.  Somewhat ambitiously, we are planning to drive across Canada in six weeks, from Vancouver Island on the West Coast of Canada, to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island on the East Coast.  Robyn has never been to Canada before and will view it all with fresh Australian eyes.  Alvin has been many times and hopes to share his love of the country.

We plan to share some of our adventures and highlights with friends, family and anyone else who is interested in our progress.