Upsetting the Mourners

---

Emma and I head out for an early morning breakfast at one of her favourite coffee haunts. We finish eating and she tells me that I now need to clear all the plates from the table, deposit them on a trolley near the kitchen, and then leave the waitress a large tip. I’m just not getting this tipping thing. Does this mean that if we’d also cooked our meals and washed the dishes we would have had to have left an even larger tip?

We collect Issy and head out for a stroll around Henderson Lake on the eastern side of Lethbridge. It's man made and massive, and was named after one of the town’s councillors and mayors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The street along its north side looks like the local version of millionaires row - palatial mansions with uninterrupted views of the lake - well almost uninterrupted - there are quite a few trees in the way if you wanted to get pedantic. We get our customary doses of Canadian friendliness. Almost everyone we walk past says good morning to us. We try to cross the street in front of the fancy houses, not expecting any cars to stop and wait for us, but they do. If we tried this back home they’d almost certainly line us up and try to run us down, particularly if we did it in front of houses as fancy as these ones.

Emma and Issy have booked themselves in to get matching mother and daughter tattoos at a local ink shop. Of course they have. It might be best if I withheld my views on what I actually think about this bats**t crazy idea, but I’m told I’m being an old fashioned fuddy duddy. I’ve never been into a tattoo parlour before. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but it probably wasn’t a waiting room full of leather couches, with deer heads and antlers hanging on the walls. Emma and Issy both sign waivers that seem to go on for several pages without reading them. I’m fairly certain Issy’s just voided our travel insurance, so I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen when she gets gangrene. I leave them to it and head off exploring, hoping that the next time I see them isn’t in the local ICU.

I’m keen to take the car down to the Oldman River which runs through a deep canyon on the west side of town. I’ve got no idea where I’m going so I turn on Google Maps on my phone. It doesn’t seem to be giving me too much warning about upcoming turns, so I miss a few, and then it tries to take me down some steep narrow gravel hiking trails. I get to a fork with a choice of going through the forbidding looking gates of the private and seemingly very exclusive Lethbridge Country Club, or the only slightly less forbidding gates of the local cemetery. I opt for the cemetery. I’m rapidly losing my sense of humour. I think I might be going just a bit quicker than I should and I get a few dirty looks from some fairly unimpressed looking mourners. I don’t seem to be getting any closer to the bottom of the valley, so I stop to investigate. Hmmm. It seems I’ve selected the pedestrian option on the phone, which might explain the hiking trails and lack of warnings about turns.

My now inked up family members are waiting for me on the footpath outside the tattoo parlour, and they don’t look too much the worse for wear. That said I’ve got a nasty feeling that gangrene might be something that only develops slowly.

We collect Michael and head out for a stroll through the very attractive Nicholas Sheran Park near where Emma and Michael live. Michael tells us that there used to be a golf course here, but now it’s just "frisbee golf". I don’t think he’s having a lend of me when says that there are different types of fribees for driving, iron play and putting, but it’s hard to be sure. I wonder if frisbee golf is any less infuriating than regular golf.

It seems that Mr Sheran was quite a local identity; the town’s economy developed around the coal mines that he first opened here in 1874. The town takes its name from William Lethbridge who was president of one of the early coal mining companies. Oil and natural gas production eventually took over from coal, and the last coal mine here closed back in 1957.

Emma and Michael have organised for us to have dinner at the Water Tower Bar and Grill, which we assume must be near the town’s old water tower. We’re sort of right. The tower was built in 1959, and when it was taken out of service around the turn of the century a local entrepreneur turned it into a restaurant. The views from more than thirty metres up are excellent, and we dine watching the sunset.

---

Comments

[RENanDREW]

Absolutely beautiful
I see I got the tabby bit right, but not the furry ears :)