Life After Work: Off To Alberta

This was an interesting day. We started off by driving Marilyn's mom and sister Nancy to the Saskatoon airport. After leaving them we had the a/c on in the car for a while as it was in the mid twenties and a bit humid. By the time we were an hour or so from Edmonton, it was windy and pouring and the temperature had dropped to 12 degrees. Having dressed for warm weather, we ended up actually having the heater on in the car for a while. But, I'm getting ahead of the day. Since we aren't on a tight timeline, we're determined to makes stops when we see something interesting. This lookout over the North Saskatchewan river is not too far north of Saskatoon.

**Tech Note: I'm just discovering that the internet connection in this hotel is painfully slow. So I may have less content than usual. **

I was lamenting the fact that so many of the old style grain elevators have been taken down. There are mostly concrete and steel structures now that just don't have the same feel of the prairies about them. The next thing we knew, we were coming up on a Western Development Museum that had collected a town's worth of old Saskatchewan buildings, including a grain elevator. We jumped off the highway and entered what was a historical representation of Saskatchewan. They had some amazing artifacts and buildings.
This is the grain elevator.

And the fire hall.

This church was very small.

The school was also fairly small but was very detailed.

This is a model of the home of one of the many Ukrainian settlers who came to Saskatchewan.

This Co Op store is a very early version of the stores that you still find in Saskatchewan today.

They also managed to get both a train and a train station. We loved the old locomotive.

There was also an amazing collection of old tractors. We were amazed at the size and apparent weight of many of them. Here are a couple examples with Marilyn beside one of them to give an idea of scale.

Once we left the museum, the weather started to deteriorate. We had talked to some people coming back from Edmonton who told us of very severe storms the night before. I think we were lucky as we got some pretty hard rain and cool temperatures but no heavy winds or thunder and lightning. I pulled off the highway to get this shot of the canola field against the dark sky. Then, while it was pouring, Marilyn took some shots through the windshield.

The rain eventually let up about a half hour out of Edmonton. We had decided to just drop off our stuff at the hotel and head over to West Edmonton Mall to explore and eat. It was only about a 10 minute drive from our hotel. It's a pretty incredible place, but there are still way too many shoe and clothing stores! Here are some of the highlights.
We walked in to find a scene somewhat like a European street. It actually reminded me of Vegas.

Then we came across the sea lion show, the pirate ship, the ice rink and the Ferrari!

We were really hungry after all our mall exploring so finished off the day at Hudson's Canadian Taproom. They made their own beer and the food was great.

This is my All Canadian Burger made with Alberta bison.