Blogs from Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, North America

26 June It’s a day of wedding domestics. First up Issy and I are summoned to take Emma to pick up her dress. I’m strictly forbidden from venturing anywhere near the fitting room, on pain of death. As another father of the bride tells me as we sit patiently in the waiting room - “you’ve got two jobs. You have to wait, and you have to pay”. Hmmm. Next up is a stop to pick up enough ice cream to feed a small African country. Then it’s off to a session at the local spray tan salon, which is proving a bit hard to find hidden away in the back blocks of an industrial estate. I hope they know what they’re doing. I think it was in the movie “Bride Wars” where one of the brides ... read more

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 ... read more

Day 8. 3447Km. I forgot to mention yesterday that I did not see a welcome to Saskatchewan sign on the highway. The sign at the Alberta visitor centre was underwhelming but to be fair I was no longer on Highway 1, the Trans Canada Highway that runs coast to coast. The rolls in the landscape got a little bigger once I entered Alberta. I’m basically camped in the valley of the last couple road pics. The river is shallow now but it’s obviously a large flood plain right beside the campground. It’s been quite dry here lately so there is a fire ban. Two nights is a row with no campfire! I’m not coping well. There are large irrigation ditches I passed over and lots of field sprinklers running too. It looks like a corn producing ... read more

We go down to the hotel breakfast area and quickly feel like we’ve been transported to the tropics. It’s in an atrium next to a swimming pool surrounded by tropical plants. Issy asks me what it feels like to be surrounded by so much plastic, but on closer inspection it seems that the plants are real; well either that or they’re made out of plastic that has a few brown spots on it and that you can tear really easily. We spend a long breakfast chatting to LeeAnne and Steve and learning a lot more about life in Alberta. Steve’s grandfather was an English military man, and he decided to leave the mother country in the 1920s with his new bride to make a new life for himself across the water in Canada. They made their ... read more

Highway #3 curls around Crowsnest Ridge and descends into a valley of lakes. The valley thus suddenly revealed, the elevation and the way it opens out before the observer, makes for a fittingly dramatic entrance to Alberta. I pedalled down through the series of little towns that together make up the municipality of Crowsnest pass: Coleman, Blairmore, Frank and Bellevue. The Frank slide is the matching bookend to the Hope slide on the Crowsnest route through the Rockies. I looked out on that somber place, boulders the size of houses piled up in a huge area, a graveyard now because most of the bodies of those killed there were never recovered. In the early morning of April 29, 1903, half of Turtle mountain fell away, buring the eastern part of Frank and killing as many as ... read more