Canada Grey Motor Inn Hanna

... out of the comfort zone - treasures await!
Wooden floors are creaky
Museums take time
Breakfasts can be so much fun!
Two months go very quickly - let’s start over again
If you see a path or trail…follow it; you will be amazed at the adventures you might have!
Be in the moment!
US border guards can be friendly
What a wonderful trip this has been - we feel blessed to have had the opportunity to go on this ‘east coast adventure’!!

... to drive when they are very young, so he thought it was a cultural experience for me. We stopped for a picnic lunch in Camrose before driving into the Drumheller, the heart of the Badlands where we were welcomed by the worlds largest dinosaur! We looked around a little bit, then went to our campsite to have some dinner and set up for the night.

... famous landmarks of Revelstoke. The largest carved wooden head. Seems like every place in Alberta needs the largest something or other as a claim to fame. Drumheller has the largest Tyrannosaurus statue. Revelstoke has the largest wooden head. Edmonton, the largest indoor mall (when it was built in the 80's it was the largest. Now it ranks 4th).

We entered Alberta around lunch time and stopped in Banff to look around, and find a place to eat. Andre and I chose Mc Donalds on the ...

263 km, a short day but a very windy one. After we left the Rockies, it immediately started getting very flat - and very very windy.

Thunderstorms tonight so the decision to stay somewhere indoors was easy.

I think the reason why we don't have cable tv at home is so we can binge on all the tv programs for free when we're staying in a motel. Survivorman, CNN, The Bounty Hunter, Wife Swap... who needs sleep eh?

... seems to have an oil pump in one of his fields. Near Joffre (and other places) are big petrochemical refineries.
I also spent a fair bit of my time trying to see a hummingbird which I finally managed. Nearly everyone in Canada has hummingbird feeders hanging off their porches or in trees and they fill them with a sugar/water mixture. They are so timy and quick and their wings are just a blur as they hover as they feed.

Well I decided I needed a down day from my life.

I took the afternoon and went to spend some time with the animals at Guzoo in Three Hills, Alberta.

We had a wonderful day, just walking around watching the animals and interacting with some of them. The lemurs will always be one of my favorites. They are so trusting and willing to interact with people without any attempt at being aggresive or ...

... that this is literally true. The visitor centre is dwarfed by an inaccurate tyrannosaurus rex 13 meters high and 26
meters long. For a fee you may climb up more than 100 steps and peer down on Drumheller from the beast's mouth.

It certainly felt like summer had arrived. The temperature was in the mid-20s and children played in the fountain on the lawns outside the information centre.

That afternoon we made a driving tour of the Red Deer River valley, heading ...

Well, after 35.5 hours in transit (20 of which were in the air) we are finally home! My ankle was so swollen I had to shuffle through 5 airports to get here. Thank goodness Ron was such a good sport about it.  We saw a billboard at the Denpasar Airport that was advertising a help line if you have trouble dealing with the corrupt police force. Excellent :)  It's good to be home!

This is a piece of our heritage that we should not miss out on. We travelled on a steam train from Stettle to Big Valley, had a large buffet dinner, were robbed by gun toting bandits and taken back to Stettler with the big transcontinental locomotive. A fun day and the traffic was light too.

... the Big Prawn, Big Banana, Big Pineapple and Big Merino) - I was about the height of his foot. The badlands are also home to some unusual rock formations called "hoodoos". I think I liked the word more than the actual rock formation in the end and couldn't stop using the word to mean anything I wanted it to mean. Or just any time it was silent really. And yes apparently that does get fairly annoying on long car journeys!