Alberta in a Nutshell: II

After Calgary, we were headed to Drumheller, where we planned to check out the new exhibit at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. The museum and a visit with our friends in Calgary was the whole point of the route we'd chosen, which jagged us back up north a little out of our way before we went south again.

Yeah. The museum never happened. We hit vicious headwinds and some nasty road construction and we just didn't make it in time. We still got to enjoy the beautiful scenery in the Badlands, though.

We ended up spending the night in the teeny little village of Delia. Delia is at the base of an ancient mountain range that was never covered by the glaciers, so the old mountain peak, Mother Mountain, sticks up over the prairie. You can see the peak as soon as you come back out of the base of Drumheller.

Delia turned out to be something of an adventure because the water services at the little campground were broken. A local man who saw us pulling our bikes in came over to explain the situation and, not wanting us to go without a place to stay, he GAVE us the keys to the town's old one-room schoolhouse, which now serves as a place for dance classes, and invited us to stay there. It had a washroom and running water and lots of room for us to set up our beds on the floor.

This was a pretty cool arrangement all in all. Until the lights went out. There's a reason people don't typically spend the night in creepy old buildings and that's because they're creepy. Creepy as in, "Uh, Honey? Was that you? No? That's...interesting." There were...noises. Thumping, creaking noises. The sound of the chairs lined up along the wall creaking. And then a thump over at the table. And then a thump right next to my head, a thump I actually FELT. At that point, I made Kieran go turn the washroom light on and the thumping died down shortly after that.

After Delia, we were off to Oyen, where we met my parents who had driven the five hours from Millet to visit with us. We all stayed in a B&B in an old Eaton's catalogue house and spent a day exploring the area, including a visit to a restored grain elevator. In the end, leaving Alberta was a little hard because it meant all our visits with friends and family were over for a number of weeks. We were a little down as we said our goodbyes and headed towards the Saskatchewan border.