May 27
MAY 27
Good idea to have two credit cards. (We do.)
We’ve had a real adventure as Costco is switching from Capital One to CIBC. Elizabeth spent hours, really hours on the phone with CIBC over many days since January. They wanted to send them to our house…we’re not there…we need them here! Finally they had them couriered to a CIBC in Medicine Hat and we picked them up yesterday. Still not right. Mine has been sent to the house in Guelph. Crazy. Now there are 4 credit cards in Guelph at the house. Amie is sending them to us…
May 27
Cycling around Weyburn. A nice trail system.
Looks like a lighthouse but Weyburn is land locked – Huh?
These sculptures of wheat are so lovely. Weyburn is a center for grain shipments – thus the wheat stalks all along the main drag.
Tommy Douglas
The local museum has the world’s largest silver collection.
May 28
Swift Current SK. We pulled into the Kinetics Exhibition Park to be greeted by horse trailers, horses and teenage cowgirls everywhere…and stock car racing too! It was fun and entertaining to see and hear it all. It was like camping in the middle of a fair and reminded me (Elizabeth) of the old musical “State Fair.” The horse events were very interesting. We enjoyed all for $35 with full hook-ups to boot!
Amazing barrel racing. We saw the teenage girls racing. The next day it was the little folks – some looked as young as 5 or 6 years old.
Medicine Hat, Alberta.
We stayed in the municipal run Gas City Campground. It is a lovely campground, one of the nicest we’ve stayed in. There are spacious sites with mature trees. I don’t know when it was opened but we saw a photograph from the opening. There were no trees at all. It is perched on the top of a coulee. From our site it looked like we were looking out over a cliff and imagined a river in the valley on the other side. Wrong – it was the Trans Canada. You couldn’t see it or even hear it.
I like Medicine Hat it’s a great place and claims to have 300 days of sunshine! And also the world’s tallest Teepee is in The Hat. While we were there, the night lights were red in support of MS month.
The Tepee was originally built for the 1988 Olympics in Calgary. A citizen of The Hat arranged for it to be transported and rebuilt along the Trans Canada in Medicine Hat. The paintings were all created by indigenous artists. They are beautiful, have interesting themes (outlined in the tourism book if anyone is interested) and huge!
We also toured the Medalta Stone Ware company. An historical site that has been restored to some degree and still creates products based on the old designs. It is also a school and has a program for resident ceramic artists. So interesting to see the processes and products. The Medalta Stone Ware company operated under different names but they supplied products all over North America and the world. They created all of the dishes used by the Canadian railways, for restaurants, special commemorative dishes and during the war, they almost exclusively produced stoneware for the armed forces. Some of the neat items were cowboy hat ashtrays with various logos, the RCA Victor Dog salt and pepper shakers and lots of ceramic mixing bowls and crocks.
So many kinds of crocks and so many different sizes. We saw a few that were taller than us. They were used for storing/shipping eggs, fish and dry goods.
Some of the original kilns. Inside the building lobby, there is a glass floor covering the floor of the first kiln built at the site. It is fascinating to see the layout and the special bricks used to build it. There is also a display of a “rolling kiln” – products were placed on trolleys that moved continuously through a huge kiln on railway tracks. This meant there was no down time in production, newly created pieces were loaded in while fired items were taken off at the other end. It was a really interesting place to tour. I’ve watched people make pottery by hand but have never seen an industrial operation working.
May 31, 2022
A day tripping day. On our way out, we passed an enormous solar farm just north of Suffield with acres of solar panels. The sky was a brilliant blue with hardly a cloud in the sky and I loved watching the cows with their calves grazing in the huge pastures along the way.
We spent the day at Dinosaur Provincial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Amazing. If you are ever out this way, GO!
I was blown away by the abrupt change in the landscape. We were driving along on the flat prairie road and then suddenly, we were in a lunar landscape – The Badlands.
We’d booked a guided, interpretive two‑hour bus tour that took us into restricted areas and we saw a fossils everywhere not to mention the amazing scenery, hoodoos etc. It was a perfect day for this excursion, sunny and cool.
Our tour bus went through the “oasis” created by the Red Deer River and where the campground is located. It’s lovely and even has electricity. Our guide told us how the graceful Plains Cottonwood Trees are well adapted to dry country. They self-prune. If there is insufficient water for the tree, it decides that a certain branch will go, cuts off water to it, it dies and falls off. They have had very dry summers recently and this one seems to be going that way too. There was little snow cover this winter. One of the main sources of water is the melting snow. Needless to say, we saw many Cottonwood limbs on the ground.
Our guide then took us into the Badlands – no trees but sage bushes and cacti were abundant. One stop was by a Duck Billed Dinosaur (need to find the name) that had been left in-situ after being discovered. Between 1910 and 1917, there was a Dinosaur Rush. People came from all over looking for fossils. There have been over 300 dinosaurs from this provincial park moved to various museums and collections around the world. The Province of Alberta decided to protect this rich area in 1955. In 1979 it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site for three significant natural features:
- the exceptional abundance and diversity of dinosaur fossils
- largest and most spectacular area of badlands in Canada
- unique riparian (riverside) habitat
The park includes over 80 square kilometers and the majority of the area is protected – the public is not allowed in without a guide. The park is a field/research station of the Royal Tyrell Museum and many digs are ongoing in the protected area. Over 49 different species of dinosaurs from 75 million years ago have been found in the park.
They removed an amazing find from this location and built a building a few feet away to house it.
June 1
Spent the day cycling around the paved multiuse paths of Medicine Hat, mostly along the South Saskatchewan River. Part of the TransCanada Trail.
Sculptures at the entrance to the Gas City Campground. Carved in place.
Lilacs in bloom here. FJ enjoyed the fragrance.
The pathway from this park took us along the South Saskatchewan river, then through a nice neighbourhood on a connecting route to another trail that took us quite a ways beside the river to an “unpaved” trail. We turned around after a few feet on the unpaved trail – huge rocks and gullies and our bikes don’t mix.
We returned but then crossed the river to ride in another park on the other side where there is a TransCanada Trail Pavilion. It was a lovely ride.
Interesting sculpture is a Bison from one side and a face/head from the other.
Can you spot the dear?
One popped out in front just before we turned the bend to find the
TransCanada Trail Pavilion.
Magpie in the campsite. I (Elizabeth) had never seen a Magpie before our trip in 2018. I love how they look especially when flying. They’re elegantly clad in Black and White with a graceful long tail. However, they sound awful and once started don’t shut up! Beautiful but annoying.
June 2
Driving to Okotoks we entered Rocky Mountain View County and realized we could see the snow-capped Rockies.
Wow. We’re going there!
Cycling in Okotoks we spotted these two deer…and some art:
Okotoks: Blackfoot word for Rock. This was placed here by a glacier originating in Jasper!
At the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in Calgary. We had a nice tour here and timed it so we could join a sing/play along jam of Canadian songs/artists. The guide was able to demonstrate some of the collection of old equipment and instruments that were the forerunners of many of our current day instruments and gear.
Pride festival we caught a bit of…bought some neat mugs…cartoons by the “Naked Pastor.” Wonder if Harcour could incorporate the logo of the cross like Okotoks United Church has?
Tomorrow we head to Fort MacLeod and some new touring adventures.
We take hundreds of pictures on three different devices. It is so difficult (and confusing sometimes) to choose and often we wish to attached more. Hopefully sharing some of the highlights will brighten your day.
Going to end here as the next camp has no WiFi so best to get this off today. Until next time:
Love from,
Jerry, Elizabeth, Misty, FJ (Flat Jesus), the guys, Miss Adventure Too, and Clifford the big Red truck.
So wonderful to read about your adventures! I'm hoping that next year it might be my turn, so I'm reading eagerly. You've passed it now, but perhaps on the way back you'll consider Grasslands National Park. It's stunning.
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