Retroblogging the megatrip: part 4b

I'm going to open this post with two amazing Leo quotes.

{while waiting at the border in Sarnia, next to a carful of girls} "Who doesn't love girls? Yeah!"

{while listening to "Gangnam Style"} "No one is sexy in the world. Except robbers that are girls. They are sexy." (Prior to this quote, I wasn't sure anyone in the back seat of our van knew what "sexy" meant. Leo might still not have known, but if so, that's a pretty fine guess)
OK, fine, two Leo quotes and this picture of a dude at the rest stop making his own shade for a nap in the middle of the parking lot.

So with Saskatchewan and rain and half of Alberta in the rearview mirror, everyone in the van woke up mid-afternoon on June 24th wondering where we were. We had cut northwest off the TransCanada Highway and were essentially driving on paved, two-lane roads through a bunch of fields. And then…we came over a rise and the badlands opened up before us. I had forgotten what it was like to come upon the striated canyon so suddenly. Green fields…brown and red rock walls running north-south as far as you can see. We cut south and pulled off in Rosedale to walk across the Star Mine suspension bridge (two bridges in two days!!).

After the bridge, we carried on to Drumheller to climb the world's largest dinosaur. Check this thing out (below)! Henry is standing at the bottom for scale. The boys were a little burnt out by the time we got back down (a lot of stairs!), but the view was pretty awesome. And I got to change Henry's diaper in the dinosaur's mouth.

Our other stop in Drumheller was to check into our nasty motel for the night. In retrospect, this was probably one of the two worst places that we booked for lodging. The one thing it did not have on the other nasty place was price. The one thing it did have on the other place was a lack of drunk people inquiring about the hourly rates. Yeah! This picture below is evidence of the sketchiness. I present to you - the motel's towel, er, rag reuse program!

Due to the fact that we drove so far the previous day, we actually had a few hours of daylight left and chose to take full advantage. We hopped back in the van, drove back past Rosedale and went to visit the hoodoos. The hoodoos are these bizarre rock formations that form as a result of erosion. There is a spectacular cluster of them behind fencing that people are asked to not disturb, but the rest of the area is open to exploration…at your own risk. And it was risky. This was maybe the tensest stretch of time for me as a parent: I was outnumbered and the kids were feeling invincible and my heart was in my throat for 30 solid minutes. I think in the end, only one child slipped, but was caught in time to avoid injury. An age-old lesson was also reinforced at the hoodoos - try to avoid doing something for just one child as the rest will also want said something and will submarine whatever you're doing until "fairness" is restored. In this case, "that thing" was referring to one of the children as "Hoodoo Master". Well, eventually they just all had to be "Hoodoo Masters", which made them feel more invincible and then it was definitely time to book it before someone died. The best part had to be the drive back to Drumheller as rain started to sprinkle just as we left the parking lot - rumour has it that things get really slick on the hoodoos when it gets wet so we timed things just right. Thankfully it was just a sprinkling. After the kids were all in bed, I was told that I was still pretty tense and that it was time to go blow off some steam at the bar across the street. So I got to wrap the day on fried mac 'n cheese, beer and World Cup soccer. My wife is the best.

Oh, whoops. I forgot to mention that things did actually end on a sour note. For Henry. Holly and I were snickering (maybe a bit too much), but Henry completely lost his gourd because he absolutely needed to go to the top of the cliff face. Here is some of the evidence:

The next day, we brought the kids to the sparkling jewel of Drumheller (sorry, Drumheller, but there's not much sparkling about you these days. Those dinosaur statues in the downtown area need some serious TLC!): the Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology. Boys like dinosaurs. This museum has dinosaurs. Therefore, boys like this museum, right? Yep. Totally nailed this one. I think we ended up spending roughly 4-5 hours on site and every one had a blast. The biggest hits were some of the dioramas that kids turned into an I-Spy game, the display on spores where you could use pressurized air tubes to fire little white "spore balls" at other people, (for people who could read) the exhibit on 25 great local moments in palaeontology, the tropical room that featured some very old species of plants, a fairly irreverent movie about how fossil fuels are made, and the underwater diorama featuring the Devonian reef. There was also the Palaeo Play Park outside, a very cool playground/jungle gym-type thing where we could picnic and burn off the last iotas of energy. Even the hyper-aggressive ground squirrels were entertaining…at least until they started feeling entitled to our lunch! BACK OFF! Holly gave one of them a needed kick at one point under our picnic table and it went airborne. Here are some pictures from our visit.

Whoof! That's a lot of pictures. And another 470 clicks on the van bringing the running total to 3,949 km PLUS all of the detours and local driving done in places where we stopped (in fact, we crossed the 4,000 km mark somewhere near where Max got THE SLIVER). Next up, my happy place: the Canadian Rockies!

Retroblogging the megatrip: part 4a

I'm just going to do a massive photo dump for this part of the next leg. I was looking through the pictures and notice the disparity between the quantity of good pictures and the number of things that we did over the first day post-Winnipeg. Why? Because the day looked like this:

Then like this:

Yep, it pretty much rained for the whole day. Whatever, we were on the road and we were going to embrace it. We were due for a rainy drive at some point anyway. This drive leading out of Winnipeg was very sentimental for Holly and I. 15 years prior, we hopped into our LeBaron convertible and set off for Vancouver to start our co-habitating life together. A lot of what was to come over the following days of our family road trip would retrace the steps we took on our maiden voyage as a couple and introduce our boys to some big moments from our past. In fact, we decided that the first stop would be in Souris (pronounced soo-riss), MB, which is the home of Canada's longest historic suspension bridge. We thought the kids would get a kick out of being on a gigantic footbridge. However, by the time we rolled up to Souris, the rain had been coming down for a while and so our packed picnic lunch became an inside-the-van affair. Then we threw our coats on and crossed the bouncy, slightly slippery span. It wasn't the same bridge Holly and I saw in '99 - an ice floe apparently threatened to rip the bridge and its moorings from the riverbank so the city decided to dismantle the bridge. It was rebuilt last year to the tune of $4.5M and was looking pretty new for us. Here are some pictures of us in Souris.

We have a picture of Holly at this same historical plaque on the way through in 1999.

After tackling the bridge, we thought we'd spent some time at the rock quarry digging for treasures (something Max and Leo would both love). While in Winnipeg, we had read an article in the Free Press about the owner of the Souris Rock Shop and some of his specimens (Thanks Grandma for saving that clipping!). He was tending the store when we arrived, waiting for a school bus from out of town to arrive for a little taste of geology. He said that unfortunately, the quarry was probably filled with enough water to go up to Max's waist and that we wouldn't be able to go. However, he did take us into the back of his shop to show us some of his neat rocks (including a fossilized mammoth's tooth, pictured below). It's really too bad we couldn't check out the quarry. Apparently, Souris is located right where a number of glaciers stopped moving, bringing rocks from far away in different directions. Today, it's a big destination for rock hounds, who can find a wide variety of stones in the ground. The boys picked out a few rocks to bring to Grand Forks for Grandpa, the rock hound in our family. Hopefully it will be drier next time we are in Winnipeg and we can make a day trip out of it!

Then, something happened that I'm not very proud about but I think is hilarious. The kids all nodded off shortly after leaving the Rock Shop and we BOMBED across eastern Saskatchewan. We actually made really awesome time and decided that we would try to press on as much as we could that day in order to make the next day a little bit shorter on the road. Plus, it's not like we were going to do a bunch of outdoorsy things on a rainy day, right? We pulled into Regina at about dinner time and discovered that someone in the back seats had a wet accident. I will protect the guilty by not naming names, but I will mention "back seat" so that nobody thinks that either Holly or I is incontinent. This started the most awesome triple shot of commercial establishment visits of all time. 1) We hit up a Wal-Mart for some upholstery cleaner. Check. 2) We needed to feed the kids and ourselves AND we wanted to figure out a way to let the kids burn off some steam after having been cooped up in the van all day. So Holly had the disturbrillianting idea to hit up Costco for a super cheap and fast dinner before heading to 3) Chuck E. Cheese for a few hours of blowing brains out playing games and earning tickets. Total cost of dinner: $10. For all of us. Picnic leftovers helped round things out I guess. To round out the budget absurdity of the evening, Holly found a Chuck E. Cheese coupon online as well. And then, off to the races:

The above picture is of Chuck, the mascot, coming into the restaurant (he apparently does this every hour) to lead the kids in a frantic round of "Head and Shoulders" before tossing tickets into the air and essentially turning the foyer into Black Friday at Best Buy. Kids cried every time. Imagine that, too much mayhem for kids.

The boys had an absolute blast at their first-ever Chuck E. Cheese visit. It was the perfect treat for them. After the brouhaha of redeeming all the Chuck E. Cheese tickets (Henry got a soft C.E.C. soccer ball, Max got a rope-cutting magic trick and Leo got a game of pick-up-sticks with their tickets), we settled in for another couple of hours on the road. The kids were into it, because this meant iPad cartoons. It was a bit of a bummer to have started the drive west of Regina at night because that is, hands down, the prettiest part of the province (short of the Qu'Appelle valley). At least we got to see some the following day. In the end, we drove something like 10 hours that day and cleared another 815 km. Not quite as impressive as our last full day in the Midwest, but pretty solid nonetheless. We pulled in at our hotel in Swift Current, cleaned some upholstery, washed the dishes, did some laundry and passed out.

Max was too tired to care that he scored a spot on the floor for the night.

At dusk, we thought that the rain had started again after a dry spell. Wrong. It turns out that the bugs hit the sky right around then and there were so many that it sounded like drops of rain. We took a few out. The same thing seems to happen in Washington State.
The first part of the next day wasn't very eventful. We drove until we hit a rest stop just before the border so that Holly could get her picture taken with some historic plaques (Holly used to have a thing for getting her picture taken with as many as possible on road trips) and so that we could kick a soccer ball and toss a frisbee with the kids. Then we found cacti on the ground where we were playing. Then Leo wanted to say "hi" to passing motorists and almost walked onto the Trans-Canada (we were NOT close to him when this happened). Then it was time to go. We got to the Alberta border right around lunchtime and snapped a couple of pictures with the kids. And then Max got The Sliver. There was a fantastic wooden play structure at the Alberta visitor's centre (not quite like this, but also not quite like this. Something in between). Max was playing and got A Sliver. The ensuing 30 minutes were filled with a lot of melodrama. I think the best was when I was working on his finger with a safety pin and he decided to twitch…into the safety pin. Max doesn't like blood. Awesome. Eventually, we poured him into the car and decided to leave the small piece we couldn't get in his finger because he simply was not going to let us near him again. As it turns out, all of that weeping and wailing wore him (and everyone else) out, so I was the sole conscious person in the van as we passed through Medicine Hat and Brooks. Then we veered off the highway toward Drumheller…which I will save for the next instalment. In the meantime, here are some pictures from the first part of day 11.