Day 11 - 

Medicine Hat

We’re still in Medicine Hat and the smoke from the forest fires is really quite nasty, but definitely not complaining as we think of those closer to the fires and the devastation.  

The sun is trying to burn through the smoke, and it made us warm.

We visited the Saamis Tepee and it literally took my breath away.  The paintings, the story boards, the overall size of it is all very powerful.  The Tepee was constructed for the Calgary 1988 Winter Olympics and brought to Medicine Hat to its permanent home.  Each of the 10 masts feature a large storyboard depicting aspects of native culture and history - I have pictures of each, and their storyboards, which I’ll put in an album when we get home.  

Cypress Hills and Maple Creek

On from there to Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park; we chose to visit the Saskatchewan side because there are more services, and we wanted to visit Maple Creek!  

1st - Maple Creek: - it was fun!  We visited Cowtown Kids Toy & Candy, wow!  It boasts “Canada’s Largest Puzzle Display” and it’s true to its word - the entire upstairs is jigsaw puzzles, including the wall.  Everything from your favourite TV show, to buttons, to Group of Seven - some have 20,000 pieces!  This is a picture of the wall, all one jigsaw puzzle.  Ray will love this place!  And a whole wall downstairs lined with board games.  

The young man who owns the toy store also owns the bookstore in Maple Creek.

There are numerous Hutterite colonies along the route and we’ve been told they and expanding all the time.  They farm the land and sell local and continue to keep the farms of the prairies going as we see a lot of the farmers who are retiring and haven’t been able to find family or others to take on the work of food production.  

Both the Mennonites and the Hutterites trace their origins to the Swiss Anabaptist movements of the 16th century; and both groups immigrated, directly or indirectly, to the Canadian Praries from German colonies in South Russia. Ah, that explains the memorial statue outside the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre in Medicine Hat!  

We went from there out to Cypress Hills, a park that spans the Alberta/Saskatchewan border.  Lookout Point is the highest elevation point between the Rockies and Labrador, elevation approximately 4,000 ft (1,275 m) above sea level.  The area was forged out by glaciers  millions of years ago, and until the decimation of their stock it was filled with roaming bison.  It was relatively easy to see through the smoke, but of course the colours and contrast were lost to us.  But you really do have the feeling of looking out onto something breathtaking!  

Where most of the grassland regions have gone to cultivation, the Cypress Hills area is a pretty well preserved ecosystem.  Each type of grass is high in protein during different times of the growing season, ensuring nutritious forage throughout the year.  Now a lot of it is used from cattle, although 1/3 of Canada’s endangered wildlife species are found in the grasslands.

The area around the Lodge where we had lunch is filled will trees with blackened bark, apparently part of the death cycle caused by pine beetle!  

This has been a lot to take in in one day - Saamis teepe, Toy Store, Grasslands.  And we even stopped at a gas station- to wash our windows!

Day 12 - 

We got up this morning ready to move on to Saskatchewan and there was a Hyundai Kona plugged in beside our car at the hotel - From BC!!!  Better yet - from Mission!  Wow.  

Interesting how the conversation went …

- what’s your range?

- what year is your car?

- how’s been your anxiety?  

- how low do you let your battery go?

- what is the cost / minute at the various charging stations?

Questions not asked …

- who are you?

- what is your name?

- do you work in Mission?

They appeared to be a lady and her father, and we did learn that they were driving to Regina to attend something then straight back to Mission, that they rolled into Medicine Hat at 1:am with 35km left in the tank!

We’re at 3,000km of our journey, and the Kona hit 40,000km.  

We blasted through a lot of western edge of Saskatchewan because we’re headed to Sylvia’s in Buena Vista/Regina Beach.  Together we are the Great and the Grand - Parents that is, to Connor and Everly.

We drove past Reed Lake, known as part of a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve, but what we saw the Salt - piles of it!  acres of !  An intermittent, shallow endorheic salt lake, same as but much smaller than Salt Lake, Utah, and their decline is leading to many environmental problem. Here’s a link if that interests you.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_lake

Swift Current - 

It’s cold here - only 9’ and I’m in sandals!  

Great little sticker store, and we laughed out loud when we read the story of Blowtorch, a life-size mechanical horse remembered on a plaque in a downtown Swift Current square.  I thought I would share it here but it’s too long, but man is it funny!  We had a nice chat with Karen back home - she’s working in the community garden and it looks hot!  We charged at the Co-Op on our way out of town and used the time to visit the Visitor Centre, lots of agricultural history of the area there.  Then we drove pretty much straight through stopping for a top up charge in Moose Jaw.  We’ll come back tomorrow and visit the town.

Day 13 - 

We’re in Saskatchewan!  We arrived at Sylvia’s around 4:30 last night and had a great dinner at Regina Beach Golf Course.  Sylvia is the Great and we are the Grand - Parents of Connor and Everly back home in Mission.  (I know I said that earlier, but we’re pretty proud grandparents!) 

She actually lives in Buena Vista, which neighbours Regina Beach and there is quite a friendly rivalry between the two - street lighting, pot holes, drinking water, yes, drinking water!  They have separate water towers with distinctly different tastes, or so we were told.

This is a seasonal community and it is the May long weekend so the population is beginning to swell.  It reminds me of living in Gibsons when the Beachcombers crew would return and the tourists!  It’s very exciting really, and we got to help with the annual Trash and Treasure fundraiser flea market.  Sylvia is a very active volunteer in the community and has made us feel right at home.  

Moose Jaw

We drove back to Moose Jaw and took in the Passage to Fortune Tunnel Tour. that tells the story of the Chinese laundry in the tunnels under River Street.  Chinese immigrants came to Canada to escape poverty in China and were employed on the railway, as servants, miners or laundry workers.  They lived in in the tunnels and most of their pay went to the ‘brokers’ who had arranged their travel to Canada, there was the Chinese Head Tax, and they would send money home to China, leaving little left to survive on. Prejudice against the Chinese was strong - one of the Chinese restaurants where people loved to eat the delicious food had its entire kitchen in the tunnels and the meals were sent up in dumb waiters to be served by white waiters!  Sounds like dumb customers, not dumb waiters.  Another opportunity for us as Canadians to reflect on our history and learn from our past.

Weiye Su, a filmmaker from Saskatchewan, has made a documentary, A Passage Beyond Fortune and is featured on CBC Radio’s The Morning Edition with Stefani Langenegger.  I’ll try and find the link for you, but most of my CBC friends will know how to do that.

We stopped for the obligatory picture with The Moose and one of the Snowbirds jets!  

Moose Jaw is home of Snowbirds world famous military aerobatics flight demonstration team of the Royal Canadian Air Force.  

I love the Snowbirds, my heart soars every time I get to see them fly over.  My dad used to take us to the Abbotsford Air Show to see them when their squadron performed aerial combat displays of their jet capabilities.

Continuing on my independent bookstore theme - Moose Jaw has an independent bookstore on High Street called Post Horizon Booksellers.  Bookseller Nelson deals mostly with good quality used books and knows of Mission’s very own Brian Murdoch!  He gave us suggestions for book shops to visit in Regina and Saskatoon.  

After dinner at Rosie’s on River we drove back through Buffalo Pound - omg, breathtaking is an understatement it is so beautiful.  It is geographically perfect for the Blackfoot and Plains Cree, traditional enemies, to corral bison and live in harmony with the cycle of the buffalo.  It is the first major lake the Qu’Appelle River reaches after leaving Lake Diefenbaker to join the Assiniboine River into Manitoba.  

The evening was filled with rich family stories - one of which was Sylvia’s Moose Jaw $5. bill story, which I’ll share when we get home $$$

I’m getting behind on things - sometimes it’s just so peaceful at the end of the day that I get little more than my journal done.  But I’m sure you don’t mind.

 

  

You’re driving across Canada in an EV ?!?

When we talk to people about our trip across Canada there are lots of questions about doing it in an Electric Vehicle (EV) I will try to answer some of them for you.

Driving in an EV across Canada reminds me of the planning that goes into a boat trip up the coast. How much fuel do we have, what is the rate of consumption, can we get to our destination, or is there a fuel dock on the way?

Part of our trip is finding and using Charging Stations and there is an app for that, actually a bunch of them, some used for route planning, and some for accessing a charging network. In BC we mostly use the BC Hydro charging stations, in Alberta we mostly used the Flo charging stations and in Saskatchewan we are mostly using the Co-op Connect charging stations.

Long Story: There are 3 types of charging stations:

        Level 1 (120-volt AC) delivering 1.3 to 2,4 kW or about 6 – 8 km an hour, 

        Level 2 (240-volt AC) 7.4 kW or about 30 km an hour,

        Level 3 DC 50 kW to 150 kW at 50 kW about 278 km an hour.

The problem with the above information is that the distance you can go will also depend on the weather, your driving habits, the speed you are travelling, how much you use the air conditioning or heater, if you are going uphill. Also, the rate of power an EV gets when charging depends on how full the battery is. If you start with a near empty battery it will charge near the maximum rate that the car will accept, as it fills up the charge rate slows down to a trickle when the battery is almost full. Our Kona starts lowering the rate of charge at approximately 73%. 

Short Story: Where’s the next charging station?

Janet and I talk about where we would like to go and plan a route based on where the charging stations are, what type of station Level 1,2, or 3 and the distance between them using either PlugShare or ABRP route planning apps.  Then we’re on our way!

2,000 km and still in Alberta!

 

We have some catching up to do!

Day 8 - 

We washed the dust off the car from our Plains adventures yesterday - in a real live car wash!  Mint Car Wash in Lethbridge had a real live person come to our window, take our money and send us in, where a young person was standing holding a paddle reading ‘Stop’ and he ushered us onto the rails and got us rolling.  Wow, I almost went back through the car wash just to get pictures.  Reminded me of the car wash at 41st and Granville when I was a kid - we would get out of the car and stand behind a window and watch the car go through the cycle.  Guess they didn’t trust us not to open the windows 😂

It’s Mother’s Day, 1st in 44 years I haven’t been with my children.  

We headed south from Lethbridge for a day trip to Aisinai’pi / Writing-On-Stone, another UNESCO protected site.  We stepped out of our car and were immediately greeted by Laura and Dustin asking if we were there for the tour.  Tour?  Yes - of course we were!

We had a 2 hour tour through some of the most beautiful and peaceful places on Earth with 3 guides; Laura (Naturalist) led the group, very knowledgeable and a great story teller; Blair was our Blackfoot Interpreter who, with his knowledge of his heritage, brought us closer to the customs and traditions of the Plains people; and Dustin (Archaeologist ) provided with what all the information that archaeologists do.  It was interesting having each of their perspectives because the petroglyphs (carved) and pictographs (painted) are over a huge period of time and the style reflects that.  More recent ‘carvings’ are only considered graffiti after 1957, otherwise they are part of the story - it will never cease to amaze what moves people to add their name and date to something as sacred as this space.  

The Milk River runs through the area surrounded by hoodoos, coulees and grasslands.  The entire area holds great cultural and spiritual significance for the Blackfoot people who regularly camped in the Milk River Valley as long at 3,500 years ago.  We were surrounded by knowledge, history, and most importantly to us - spirituality.  The stories in the pictographs were interesting to me because they didn’t record things like hunting (buffalo-jump) or gathering, they seemed more about power, battles and horse raids with pictures of shields and animals.  And some represent visions of Spirit Beings and spirituality.  

Laura told us the story of Napi, the trickster, who gave his buffalo hide to Rock when he was too warm, and then took it back.  It is a wonderful story, told eloquently by Laura, but too long to repeat here, but a few highlights involved how the beaver came to have a flat tail, how the bat came to have a pushed in face, and how the ‘erratic’ in Okotokos came to be there.  Archaeologists will tell you it was carried there by a glacier, but the Blackfoot tell a very different story involving Napi, the trickster.  You will have your own interpretation of the story when you get there.

The Northwest Mounted Police outpost certainly put a different perspective on things.  The NWMP force was formed in 1873 to give the NWT a government presence, to ensure a lawful region for European settlers and to stop the liquor trade which was devasting the First Nations People.  The thought was that the trafficking of liquor would be easily enabled in the area of Aisinai’pi because of the coulees, easy and sheltered passage from the US; but instead the NWMP spent most of their time on tedious tasks of fighting prairies fires, herding American-owned cattle back across the border, and riding long patrols along the boundary.  Many of the bored Mounties deserted, some busied themselves with carving their names into the sandstone rocks and using the cliffs as target practice.  

We shared an intimate few minutes with two mating Bull Snakes outside the interpretation centre - they are constrictors, the only constrictors in Canada.  These guys are huge, one of the largest/longest snakes of North America, reaching lengths of up to 8 ft., they’re yellow and spotted.  

I certainly could use another few days with Laura the Naturalist, that’s for sure - so many

Day 9 - 

Taber:   We left Lethbridge with a pretty full charge and headed east toward Medicine Hat - but not without a stop at Taber, Alberta!  We wanted to top up our charge and drop into the Taber Irrigation Impact Museum, we were curious how these miles and miles of farmland for as far as you can see got their water, and Brenda at the museum had all the answers!  

It all began with Tank 77, (located 77 miles along the CPR track from Dunmore to Taber).  The tank fed the steam engines that carried coal mined at Coal Banks (Lethbridge) to Medicine Hat..  

It became apparent that the millions of acres of grassland could be used to grow crops and Alberta Rail and Coal Co. were to sell the land for a good price it would need to be irrigated.

A call was put out to the L.D.S. Church headquarters in Utah offering the 30,000 acres of land at a cost of $1.00 per acre if they would come to Alberta and build an irrigation system.  Pioneering families flocked to Alberta, and that’s how Taber got its name - the Mormon settlers suggested the place be called “Tabernacle”, and Taber it was!  As series of irrigation canals were built and farmers book their day(s) to water and the taps come on, rain or shine.  There is a great relief map of the whole system in the Taber Irrigation Impact Museum.

Brenda tells us that Taber is the Corn Capital of Canada - a claim to fame they will have to duke out with Chilliwack!  

The pioneers did well: 

* Taber is: 

- the largest producer of Beet Sugar refined by Rogers Sugar, still the largest employer in the area

- provides the potatoes for McCain, Frito-Lay etc, McCain still has their plant there

- home of Lucerne (which I thought was dairy?  Another Question!)

- Spitz sunflower seeds 

- Westons

- EV charging station at the Museum!

Brenda directed us to visit the Coulees in her favourite park along the Oldman River, where we picnicked in a huge stand of cottonwood.  

Medicine Hat:  Back in the car and on to Medicine Hat, which we loved so much we stayed for three full days!  

Not much open today because it is Monday, and like a lot of towns where the shops are owner operated, they enjoy 2 days off in a row, but lots of good window shopping and the commitment to spend the day in town tomorrow.  There are lots of wonderful murals and a really cool park beside the courthouse that has a giant chess set noted in the Guinness World Records in 2009 as the largest chess set board.  It was sponsored by various community groups, including Rotary of course!  And a wonderful Rotary ping pong table as well.  And no graffiti!  Across the street is the Esplanade Centre with a statue honouring the Germans from Russia and all the Pioneer Settlers in Western Canada.

The day was hot, and the shade welcome with a breeze coming up off the South Saskatchewan River. 

We booked into the Medicine Hat Villa, a wonderful boutique hotel right in the heart of the city, we can plug into the trickle charge and spend the day walking everywhere.

Day 10 - 

As promised, we’re staying downtown Medicine Hat today and exploring, especially River Bee Books, the new independent bookstore in town. Bridget and her husband have put together and lovely space in Railway Ave. and she sold out over 1/2 her stock in the first week! Guess Medicine Hat was ready for a bookstore!  Bridget’s yoga teacher was kind enough to give me a lesson on “tagging”, Instagram and a few other unfamiliar things which I hope I will remember!  I would love to get all of these independent bookstores linked …. 

We explored a fully loaded, elegant kitchen store called Sunday Dinner, had coffee and a scone at  The Station where the owner ?Jake gave us all sorts of information on what to do in Medicine Hat, and a lesson in Disc Golf!  While we were having dinner at the “Local” we watched a large team of mostly male youth all wearing blue t-shirts with a yellow logo picking up litter - it is a skateboarding club and they do a downtown cleanup once a year.  Very Cool.  And who knew skateboarders had clubs!

We visited the century old Medalta Potteries (Med being Medicine Hat, Alta being Alberta), in the Historic Clay District where pieces were produced that everyone of us would recognize, Centennial pieces, cowboy hat ashtrays, familiar dinner ware and of course the Medalta bowl, I have the one my mother used to make bread every week (and my cat Sweetie Pie later slept in when it lived on top of my fridge!).  There are 3 huge brick urns on the site, which now serves as a museum, and also site of a contemporary ceramic arts residency program.

We wrapped up the day with a real treat - pedicures by Hailey and Morgan.  This was Roger’s 1st and definitely the best! 

The smoke is beginning to roll in from the forest fires and our family in Hay River are packed and ready to go on a minute’s notice, and in the meantime they’re watering down their house. 

I was thinking this blog would take us out of Alberta but there are still things we want to see and do before heading to Saskatchewan so we’ve decided to stay an extra day.  

MeAnd’Er ing out of Alberta

 

We’re making our way East as our friends in Hay River are making their way West to escape the forest fire.  Our hearts and prayers are with them.

Day 6: 

We gave ourselves more time in Lethbridge because there is so much to see in this part of Alberta.  Let me start off with Analog Bookstore in Downtown - my favourite bookstore so far.  It’s owned by Penny and Scott and they have done an outstanding job making it interactive - a Postcard table with Analog postcards to hand write and mail to your friends and family, the local post office got involved and found them some really cool stamps.  I mailed a card to Amy at Totally Book-ish in Mission.  They also have an old typewriter set up for you to leave a note on what we love about independent bookstores.  And - the bookstore cat looked just like our family cat Roxanne, and there’s a whole serendipity story around that that I’ll tell you when we get home.  

https://www.analogbooks.net/

The streets here are so wide - 4 lanes plus angle parking on both sides!  Wow, if we did that in Mission wouldn’t have any shops!

There’s a really big park in the centre of town that was set aside for the city by the Galt Company Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company, commemorating the Galt family who were an intricate part instrumental in developing Lethbridge through the coal resources found nearby.  And not unlike many city parks, is home to a number of people who are experiencing homelessness.  It’s huge, beautiful, and has a large Rotary presence.  Unfortunately, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery was closed.  We had a wonderful lunch at a little place called the Streatside Diner and the server gave us a business card to add to our collection of independent bookstore bookmarks!  How sweet is that.

We spent the afternoon at the Nikki Yuko (from Nihon meaning Japan and ka from Kanada or Canada, and Yuko, which translates as friendship) Japanese Gardens and it tells an amazing story of people who migrated to Canada from Japan for economic and employment opportunities.  It is a beautiful, peaceful sanctuary nestled on 4 acres.  If you want to read more about it, here is the link, and the Bio section is particularly good.  https://nikkayuko.com/

And, as serendipity seems to be in full force on this journey, we happened to be there the day the Minho Dancers performed traditional dances. 

We’re struggling with finding places to eat that aren’t “restaurant” food, but we’ll get it figured out.  I’m craving a Buddha Bowl!

Day 7: 

Today we tested our limit in what we could do in a day, and a test it was!

3 destinations in 1 day -

*  McBride Wind Farm

* Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

* Waterton Lakes Park

with a stop in Fort MacLeod to charge the car and poke around a bit.  Cute little town in kind of a time warp, but it does have a charging station so I have to give it that.  An outpost of the North West Mounted Police, but most importantly - the birth place of Joni Mitchell 💞. Now if that doesn’t give a town claim to fame I don’t know what does!  

So let’s start with Wind Farms - there are turbines all over the place but what we were looking for was an interpretive centre or someplace that could tell us what is going on, how they work?  where the energy is going?  etc.  We’ll, let me tell you - Siri couldn’t make up her mind if we should go to McGrath Wind Farm in Carston  County or McBride Wind Farm in Fort MacLeod, so she took us through miles of unpaved backroads through farms and cattle pastures.  At one point we were very near to crossing the border into Montana, and heading so far east along the border that it felt we would end up in Saskatchewan. 

I felt a bit like Don Quixote chasing windmills, and Siri was Sancho.

Here’s what we found: The McBride wind farm has 114 turbines and generates enough energy to power more than 32,500 homes for one year.  The production of energy generated by wind power at the McBride facility reduces annual emissions by 235,000 tones of CO2.  Switching to electricity generated by wind power instead of electricity generated by wind power instead of electricity generated by wind power instead of electricity derived from burning fossil fuels for you annual electricity needs would be equal to not driving your car 30,000km.

That’s Roger standing at the base of the tower!

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

Really, that is what it is called.  It is 22km from Fort MacLeod and the Interpretive Centre is built into the side of the mountain, so respectful and unassuming. 

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump was inscribed on the World Heritage Sites list in 1982, joining places of “outstanding universal value” such as the Pyramids, the Great Wall, Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, Stonehenge and nearly 1,000 more. 

The story is amazing of the practice of the Blackfoot Indians in the Great Plains staging animal behaviours to have the buffalo (bison) gather into drive lanes and finally stampede over the cliffs.  The hunters disguised themselves as wolves to appear as a threat, which made the buffalo tighten the herd to protect the young, then others disguised as lost calves to bring the herd to follow in one specific direction lining them up into the drive lane lined with branches.  Then others disguised as buffalo running to encourage the stampede, which brought the buffalo over the jump, and certain death!

Every part of the animal was used and prepared for provisions for travel and over the winter.  The conditions had to be just right so several sites were used across the Plains.

Later the buffalo were pretty much wiped out by hunting crews killing as many as 100/day to provide hides for coats for the Canadian and American armies and the NWMP, taking only the hides and leaving the carcasses to rot.  Farming also contributed to the demise of the buffalo as land was cleared of native plants to make room for crops, much like we clear forests in other parts.

The Bison are now a protected species with herds down from 10’s of thousands to a few hundred.

Waterton Lake National Park

Last stop this blog, I promise!

This place was a must see according to many - especially a young man in a gallery in Canmore who, with full body language described the flat prairie into the rolling hills into the mountains.  And he was right - the Rockies are Right There!

The Waterton Park Front is a conservation project with local ranchers and the Nature Conservacy of Canada and the W. Garfield Weston Foundation to save approximately 30,000 acres and is maintained by local ranchers for more than a century and is the largest private land conservation initiative in Canadian history.  Pretty impressive.  

The mountains in the background are the Rockies in Montana’s Glacier National Park.

The village is resort town-ish but nice - not sure if the “See you next year” signs in shop windows mean “See you next Summer” or “See you next Winter”, the message wasn’t very clear.  But Pat’s gas station was doing a booming business in the bike rental department!  

We stopped for dinner at the Lakeside Chop House where I found my illusive Buddha Bowl - which Roger had because I opted for the crab cakes!

Other points along the way: 

 * Pincher Creek - Ian Tyson lived there

 * Spring Point Colony - another Hutterite colony

 * I have a cold!

A very long day chasing down windmills, buffalo and Rockies, we didn’t get back to our room in Lethbridge until 8PM.

MeAnd’Er ing our way across Alberta

Day 8:  - Time for an update: Last time we left you we were in Canmore on Tuesday evening, Day 3 … 

Day 4: Today we hit 1000km on our trip!

Canmore is breathtaking, right at the foot of the Rockies surrounded by massive mountains.  The mountains are Right There!!  After my Rotary meeting (Zoom from Mission), and a quick breakfast and a visit to an another wonderful independent bookstore - Cafe Books.  

Then we back tracked to Lake Louise and Banff because it was pouring rain when we came through yesterday, a bit better today. Not a lot of tourists this time of year - there was still ice on Lake Louise! 

For all my school friends, this sign is outside Banff Elementary, thought you might like it!

We had a coffee in the Banff Springs Hotel after spending most of the day walking around town. Hey, the Lounge in the hotel even has a ‘rude guy’ - you know the type:  Takes a window seat, best view in the house, orders a coffee, takes out his laptop and sits there for hours!  Doesn’t even look out the window! 

Great lunch at Banff Sushi, where a model CP Rail engine pulled a train full of sushi around the track and we picked off the dishes we wanted. - very cool.

We took Hwy 1A back from Banff to Canmore and came upon an Internment Camp landmark at Castle Mountain.  It was established in 1915 to intern Austrians and Germans during WW1 when 60 prisoners were marshalled off a Canadian Pacific train and escorted to a barbed wire compound at the end of what is now Lake Louise road, and stayed interned until 1920.  There were a total of 24 internment camp operations in Canada’s National Parks holding 8.579 men prisoners of war.  Very sad

Day 5: May 11th

We left Canmore today and headed to Lethbridge.  But not without stopping in Cochrane.  We saw our very 1st Alberta cowboy.  The drive was through beautiful ranch country, flat and wide.  I said to Roger we better get used to it because that’s about all we’re going to see for a month!

Downtown is fantastic 

 - a consignment store  that refers to Closet Cleansing and has shoes lining the steps going upstairs

 - a fully loaded kitchen store

 - an 80 year old cobbler who’s been doing it since he was 10, and has the family owned Western Wear store next door

 - independent bookstore called “Found” with loads of spots to sit and read and a treehouse for the kids.  I bought Everly a really great book called “Press Here” that is really fun to read

And over lunch: 

“Why?” I ask the waitress, is there a starfish on your banners?  “I don’t know, that’s a really good question” she replied, “I’ll ask the Mayor next time he’s in for lunch”!

    Gotta love small towns!

Next stop - Vulcan!

Starship Enterprise - Why Vulcan? you may ask - 

Because the town wanted to tap into the growing tourist market interested in space tourism, science and Star Trek.  

Roger thinks Spock was a Vulcan - 🤔 

He was!  Born in the year 2230 in the city of Ski’Kahr, Vulcan to parents Sarek and Amanda Grayson.

Who knew?  - Seems like Roger did!

Until next time - 

So long for now!