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Published: June 24th 2022
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Today we head three hours west from Hanna to the town of Canmore in the Rocky Mountains, not too far from Banff. We‘re sad to be leaving our wonderful hosts; they’ve plied us with endless food, drink and great company, and turned their home into a COVID hospital to accommodate us without a second’s hesitation. We both feel a lot more comfortable about Emma being so far away from home with this great family keeping a close eye on our baby girl. We’re also sad to be leaving their insanely goofy canine Neo. When I went outside this morning he went crazy as usual, howling with joy, and jumping and slobbering all over me. Apparently LeeAnne has this to look forward to every day when she comes home from work.
Emma tells us she’s never been to Drumheller, so we stop there to show her the dinosaurs. We buy tickets to climb the 106 steps to the top of “The World’s Largest Dinosaur”. We’re told there’ll be a short wait, as a youngster has had an “accident” up there, and they’re still cleaning up the mess. Hmmm. We didn’t see any body parts or obvious signs of blood on the
footpath as we came in, but it seems this was a different kind of accident, the type where you get smelly shoes if you step in it. We go out through the monster’s mouth to admire the view. Woah! The whole thing’s swaying in the breeze. I’m starting to feel decidedly woozy, and no surprise a youngster would have had an “accident” up here, something we’re told is not at all uncommon.
To get out of town we need to negotiate a dreaded local traffic hazard, the “four way stop sign”. This accident-waiting-to-happen is a cross road with stop signs on all four sides. Apparently everyone’s supposed to stop, and the car that got there first then has right of way. What inevitably seems to happen however is everyone gets there at the same time. They all then stare at each other as they wait patiently for someone to go. Eventually everyone loses patience, and they all charge forward at the same time. Ambulances then come from everywhere to clean up the carnage…well that’s what it feels like. I really don’t like four way stop signs.
We skirt around the north side of Calgary and get our first
glimpses of the snow-clad Rockies through the clouds and intermittent showers. Stunning.
We stop for lunch at a roadside cafe that doubles as a cultural centre for the local Chiniki First Nations People. It sounds like the Canadian Government didn’t treat these guys too much better than we did our aborigines. They plonked them on a reservation which the Indians assumed was for just one of their tribes, but it turned out to be for all three. It wasn’t nearly big enough to provide enough food, and rumour had it that the local evangelist made the call on jamming them all in together so he didn’t have to go too far to preach. Hmmm.
We remember Banff as being stunning, but Canmore is perhaps even more so; the mountains are closer to the town and literally tower over it. Our hotel is right next to the train line. We passed a freight train out on the prairie earlier in the day, and we seemed to spend forever passing it. Issy reckons one she saw out the hotel window took three minutes to go past, and I count a staggering 169 carriages on the next one. These guys‘d give
our Aussie Pilbara iron ore trains a run for their money in terms of length. We read that this is part of the Canadian Pacific Railway system which has tracks running right across the country all the way from Montreal to Vancouver, and into the northern USA. It’s headquartered in Calgary and most of the action is up this end of the line, particularly between Calgary and Vancouver. Whilst they still run some well-known luxury passenger services, the vast majority of their traffic is now freight, predominantly grain and coal. I think we might be in for a sleepless night; it’s nearly midnight and another monster just rolled past outside the window. Well I think it was outside; it somehow felt a lot closer than that….
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