Phil Mercer

Monday, June 04, 2007

Western Canada (Part 6)

 

2/6/2007: Peter Lougheed Provincial Park.
Last night was a little unexpected.
We had arrived at friends of Gareth's - Cartney and Gavin - to spend a couple of nights in Calgary. However they had already got plans to take their trailer out camping. So we tagged along too.
With Friday to ourselves we drove out to the ancient burial site of many hundreds of dinosaurs - Drumheller. This town is a tacky collection of motels, fast food outlets and plastic dinosaurs. One of which at the visitor centre is apparently the "largest in the world".
The town is a two hour drive across flat and boring land. But when you get to it, you descend in to a strange looking canyon called the Bad land's. The drive around takes up to an hour, and except a few interesting views was a little disappointing.
The big highlight is the Royal Tyrrell Museum. It is a well presented, educational collection of a huge number of skeletons and bones. Probably the only museums that comes up to the excellent British standards. We spent much longer their than expected, so had to cancel a hair appointment we'd made (how gay, but i was slowly taking on the appearance of the Yeti!) but it was worth it.
In amongst this bizarre landscape there are some even more odd looking rock formations called the Hoodoo's. They didn't quite live up to their reputation!
We then headed back through Calgary to meet up with Cartney and Gavin at their trailer in the Kananaska Provincial Park. It's back in the Rockies, a left turn before you get to Banff.
The landscape is once again stunning with forest and mountains. It's one of those pretty little corners the locals know about but the travel guides ignore .
Cartney and Gavin have a great big caravan with every home luxury (including shower and microwave) and they made me feel very welcome. After a night of G and T's by the fire, a short walk by one of the lakes got me my final animal on my list, a Moose. It was time to go home! In the end I'd driven us 3780k's. 2348 miles.
Henriette the Hyundai did us very well, apart from the several thousand dead bugs squashed on the front!

# posted by Phil @ 3:07 pm

Comments: Post a Comment