Dan and Lexie Gordon Family Blog: June 29 2008

Being anxious to get farther south we decided to push the night and drive from Liard Hot Springs rather than camp there for the night. We were pleased to find a pull out at a view spot that did not have a no overnight parking sign by it. This really is a different trip than the time I came through 10 years ago. I remember on that trip how far I felt I was from everything. I found the area isolated and empty. Where as on this trip I felt that I was very close to things. It filled my soul to have the privilege of being in such a place. The vast stretches of untouched forests are simply amazing. Those forests are a place where trees fall and no one hears them.

I was surprised to learn that we were next to the terminal range of the Rocky Mountains. It is always fun to find a land mark like that. When we are in New Mexico I would like to try to get to the southern terminal range so that I will have been to both ends of the Rockies.

If I read the sign right and remember my pictures correctly that is the terminal range of the Rocky Mountains.

A mountain sheep

We didn't have any activity planned for the day other than driving. We stopped for a while for the kids to play on some playground equipment at one of the gas stations. We met some people who were school teachers with the summer off taking their family from Pennsylvania to Alaska. They were a lot of fun to talk to and seemed to be enjoying their road trip. It was tempting to just stay at the RV park next to the camp ground for the night but we decided to push farther south because it seems it is often easier to get miles (or kilometers while traveling in Canada) in the evening than in the morning. To many consecutive evenings of driving are a recipe for getting the kids to start fighting but we guessed and were right that we would get away with it this evening.

We had all of the tanks which needed to be empty full and all of the tanks full which needed to be empty so we got a full hookup site in Fort St. Johns for the night. I wasn't over or under whelmed with the park for quality. It was nice to have a place to sleep.

The exciting part of the morning driving was that after only a little more driving we arrived at Dawson Creek, mile 0 of the Alaska Highway. We celebrated finishing the Alaska Highway portion of the drive by buying a couple of pizzas for lunch. There was an internet hot spot in the parking lot by the information center but I wasn't able to connect to it from inside of the trailer and found the sunlight to bright and the wind too strong to make browsing on the internet practical outside. I went into the information center hoping to find a bench from which to work. I realized of course that being an information booth they probably could tell me exactly what I wanted to find on line anyway. It is funny how technology sometimes becomes a crutch. The information desk was in deed helpful and we got more ideas of fun things to do in Edmonton than time to do them. There is a small museum attached to the information center. We decided to take the kids through the museum both to get them some more time out of their seats and to make some steps back toward our original charter of the travel and work toward learning as much as possible not only from books but especially from the new places we visit.

Once inside the museum I found myself disappointed that we had not gone in the museum on our way up the highway. There was a lot of fascinating information about the construction of the highway. I don't feel verbose enough to mention much of it here but a couple things that stood out to me were that even though the percentage of African Americans in the military was somewhere around 3% the percentage of soldiers working on the road who were African American was on the order of 40%. It is sometimes hard to remember how different the world was not very long ago. Another thing I thought was funny is that since the punishment for driving a truck off the road was 5 days in KP. The fact that KP was heated and the truck was not meant that there were several trucks which were deliberately slid off the road in order to offer the driver a chance to warm up. The military changed their policy to be first the truck needed to be pulled out and then the driver could go to detention.

A very basic fact that I had missed was the reason for the road in the first place. The road was constructed as part of a military objective in World War II. It is easy to think of a road as simply a road and not give much thought to its presence. It is hard to say if the highway had an influence on the war but for what ever reason it makes me think of the road differently knowing that it was constructed for a war.

The day's driving got us to Williamson Provincial Park about an hour out of Grand Prairie by around 5PM. Not wanting to try and cheat another evening out of the kids we stopped for the night. The park is gorgeous. There is a huge lake and lots of cut grass to play on. The kids were also happy to have playground equipment. On the drive I was telling Lexie that you just never know when you are going to have a lot of fun. When on thinks back on the highlights of one's life those moments that stand out the brightest are often spontaneous and unmeditated. They are moments at which one is living for the moment and nothing else. While it is uncertain how long the memories will last this evening did provide those sort of moments. After dinner with near perfect out door weather we started a fire to roast marshmallows, played our story game where one person will start a story and then everyone else will take a turn continuing the story and finally played a version of charades in which I was the "animal wizard" and would turn the kids into animals, the only way they could be returned to their human state was for a human to guess which animal they were. I was delighted with how well David played the game. He made a wonderful lion and then a wonderful little frog.

The kids liked getting out on playground equipment.

We shared a wonderful evening as a family.

Natalyn taking her turn as the animal wizard.

I thought it was great to see Canadian geese in Canada. I am not sure that this was not my first time to see wild goslings.

We got started relatively early in the morning to try to get to Edmonton by noon. We made it by 1:00 Mountain Time which proved to be soon enough. We went straight to the Fort Edmonton Living History Museum. I was very impressed with the fort. The exterior walls were about 25 feet high with a large look out tower in the fort. There were several people in costume who would answer questions and give information about the time period. I was impressed to see a narrow covered wagon and realized that I had failed to ever think about the large western migration that had happened in Canada. When people came from Europe I always took it for granted that they came to the US but the fact was that many went to Canada. After the fort there are different streets representing different time periods starting at 1885 and moving into the 1940's in about 20 year increments. I was impressed that in the 1900's people lived in Edmonton year round in wall tents while they were waiting for their houses to be built in the midst of a labor shortage. I continue to get more and more interested in wall tents.

The kids made themselves a nest out of lawn clippings. I am sure they understood the reason they needed to do it.

The kids observing and old chess set (the chess set isn't in the picture)

Fort Edmonton

A trip back in time.

After finding the first two RV parks we tried full and finding that despite Lexie's best efforts at selling the idea, the kids were not absolutely enthralled with the thought of seeing dead people without their skin, we decided to move south toward Drumheller and skip a trip to the local science museum we had been considering. We did find that the Body Worlds exhibit which we are interested in seeing will be in Salt Lake this fall. I was a little superstitious about our decision not to see the exhibit in as much as we were in line for the exhibit in Phoenix and got out of line the same day we got in the car accident. So far if there is a curse attached to skipping the exhibit it has passed us over.

The evening driving got us to a Wal Mart about an hour north of Drumheller in Stettler. It was nice to find a free spot to camp for the night. A very unpleasant discovery that evening was that somehow a mouse had gotten into our trailer. Fortunately Lexie was very brave and was much quite rational about the situation. In the morning we bought several supplies for killing and scaring mice.

Having learned in Edmonton that Canada Day was on Tuesday July 1st and was resulting in full campgrounds we made securing a camp site the first order of business upon arriving in Drumheller. We were pleased to get the second to last site available at the park which I am not really sure is even a true site in that we are parked in a driveway next to the campground owner's house using water and power from the house. At any rate it has a huge tree for shade and the park has a good location in town.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum is great not only in name but in content. Seeing the displays in the museum got me excited to finally learn the different epochs and periods of the world's geology. The museum is organized as a trip through time showing fossils oldest to youngest. A simple and obvious discovery I made at the museum was about how intimately linked geology and paleontology are. Knowing the time period of the rock one is examining is a great step toward understanding what one might find in the rock. I think it would be fun to get good at prospecting for fossils. I took a look through the gift shop but didn't find a "how to" book about hunting fossils that quite matched the criteria I was searching under. I resolved to do some research once I had internet access again.

David has a habit of grabbing his hair and sucking his thumb when he is a little unsure of things.

Natalyn taking a brief look at the history of the world.

The museum had a ball pit the kids loved.

Ty looking at a saber tooth cat display.

This T-Rex find is less than 10 years old however new research has revealed that the arms are not anatomically correct. There are only two complete T-Rex arm fossils found to date.

After a couple of hours everyone was done with the museum so we went back to the trailer for dinner. After dinner we went to see the "World's Largest Dinosaur" a 100 foot T-Rex model. For $10 we were able to climb up the inside of the dinosaur for a unique view of town. I am sure in the late Jurassic period many paid much more for a similar view.

The world's largest dinosaur.

Dallin, Ty and Natalyn on the toe of the worlds largest dinosaur.

Through the bowels of the beast.

A unique view of Drumheller. Or maybe a better way to put it would be a view unique to Drumheller.

The kids loved playing in a free splash park under the dinosaur. In the heat I found myself drawn to walk through a couple of the sprinklers as well. I am not sure what the actual temperature is here but coming out of Alaska it sure seems hot. I know it is the most practical to have the baby in Idaho but that hasn't stopped me from whining to Lexie about leaving Alaska. With that said I am excited to get back to Idaho, I am just not excited to get back to heat.

Going to church in Drumheller was very nice. The people were extremely friendly, we got an invitation to hang out at one families house during Canada Day and another family said they would try and meet us at the museum so that their boy could play with Tyrell.

After some discussion we decided that even though for some reason it felt odd to celebrate another country's holiday it really didn't make much sense to skip Canada Day while in Canada so we decided to extend our stay in Drumheller and are now planning to depart the day after Canada Day.