From Beef to Wheat

May 4, 2006
Finally the weather was sunny and warm with only a little breeze; we stripped off our sweatshirts finding t-shirts sufficient. Drumheller, a tourist mecca in the summer was void of visitors. At the info centre, we were the lone inquisitors. At the Royal Tyrrell Palaeontological Museum, it was just us and several high school classes out on field trips. They were fairly well behaved but still adolescents are best avoided, so we skirted around them. The museum is really well done – lots of fossils (other than us) and vestiges of dinosaur bones and the recreated dinosaurs are spectacular. As all museums will do, the Tyrrell even moreso made us aware that our personal existence is less than a nanosecond in time – we were exploring back billions of years. We came out assured that our little blink of time must not be wasted. Let’s motorhome on! A circular tour of the badlands on the Dinosaur Trail was peacefully beautiful - no tourists. Caesar seemed to be on the hunt for dinosaur bones as he ambled excitedly, nose to the ground. Gas was the cheapest we’d seen - in Drumheller 98.9 cents / litre – of course we filled up our behemoth before pulling out.

The roads were so straight and direct, we put Maggie on cruise control and reached the Saskatchewan border in no time. The ranches gave way to wheat fields and grain elevators - from Alberta beef to Saskatchewan wheat. There was quite a lot of flooding in the fields – I’m not sure if it was from heavy rains or a late snowmelt. In the towns, deeply etched tire tracks in the gumbo of mud had dried and cracked leaving dust in its wake. I wonder if millions of years from now, archaeologists will find the fossilized 4x4 pickup tracks much as they’ve found dinosaur footprints. The muck covered even the paved surfaces, which were pretty chopped up from the hard winter.

We stopped for the night in Kindersley, a town of 4,900 people. I wandered into the Petrocan and did the usual routine of chatting up the clerk a bit before asking her if there was anywhere in town we could park our motorhome for the night – the friendly woman said “Sure thing, Hon – you can park at the back of the station if you like; or down at the Kindersley Inn – they have a big parking lot or you can join the truckers on the Frontage Road.”

We pulled in behind the gas station but found it was very uneven and there was a lot of broken glass at the backside, so we unhitched the car (we can do this in less than a minute now) and drove down to the Kindersley Inn to check it out. The parking lot looked neglected - mud and gravel and was deeply potholed. In addition, the inn appeared to be the local hangout beer parlour, so we drove across the highway to the Zeller’s where we asked permission to park overnight. “Absolutely not!” the officious manager stated emphatically “We support our local campsites – you can go there”. Zeller’s is no Walmart – I know where we’ll spend our money. The only option left was to join the truckers.

The Frontage Road was paved and curbed, and between it and the highway was a wide grassy (and green) verge. We slipped in ahead of several trucks and spent the night quite comfortably. We found a satellite signal right away, which cheered us when we could watch the latest instalment of Survivor.