Longest day

A Mammoth day trip!!



Early November saw us visit Drumheller, home of the Royal Tyrell Museum and the Hoodoos. The Tyrell is a world renowned dinosaur museum and is sited in the badlands of Alberta where many fossils are found. For all that it's a small town kind of in the middle of nowhere it is prime real estate on the top of any paleontologists dream list of places to live and work.

They call it the Royal Tyrell Museum, which we wondered at. Surely Her Maj never made it this far west? Well she did, on the same trip she went up the QE II highway linking Edmonton and Calgary (one of the straightest, dullest most God-forsaken bits of 'pavement' I've ever had to roll along). Apparently she liked the Museum SOOO much she let them append the Royal prefix to it, and one can quite see why. It was very impressive, and not just to and uber-geek like me; even Victoria was kept interested for several hours.

Pictures you see here are of a Woolly Mammoth, Albertosaurus, Triceratops with T-Rex and some other local ceratopian, all found locally. It was nice that a museum of this world renowned would let us take pictures free of charge.

(Albertosaurus above was a ferocious carnivore. Modern Albertans are still vicious predators when chasing down meat. They'll do anything for prime Alberta AAA beef; it's really that good.)

There is a statue as you walk in of the fabulously mustachioed Joseph Burr Tyrell. Apparently he liked the museum so much that in 1907 he named himself after it.

That's about it for the museum. Lots of bones, lots of models, all cool for boy and geeks. I thought I'd put in some of the ordinary touches of life as a tourist too.

We left Calgary on the Deerfoot heading North. The Deerfoot is the local name for the No 2 highway (the QE II), a 2/3/4 lane highway running from Edmonton 3hrs North of Calgary all the way to Montana in the South. It picks up the name 'Deerfoot trail' as it goes though Calgary City for about 50 km. All the major highways running though Calgary are called the Something Trail; there's Bow (after the river), Memorial, Crowchild, Sarcee, Shagganappi (say it, it's fun!), MacLeod and probably others. Most of the snarl ups in Calgary happen when one meets the other at either lights or a clover leaf. This is the name for a junction where traffic has to Merge. Calgarians are notoriously bad at this, often cutting each other up and with a selfish tendency to drive right on the back bumper of the car in front so no one can squeeze in and looking dead straight ahead in their 3 or 4 tonne over-sized Dodge Ram truck so they couldn't POSSIBLY have noticed you. Come on guys; one in, one along, one in, one along etc. That way everyone actually gets home faster, soother, safer and without any stress caused by near-collisions/unnecessary horn tooting/finger-waving etc.

So there we were, merrily heading North on the Deerfoot at 108 km/h, listening to Billy Joel on the i-trip. We were being careful to not break the 110 km/h speed limit (67 mph). Sadly we missed the 80 km/h signs at the start of the construction work cones. (I rush to point out that there were no workers present.We'd TOTALLY have noticed them and slowed down. Sadly we were at the front of a run of cars so there was no one in front of us to prompt us to slow down. We did that kind favour to the cars/trucks behind us.) Anyway, we missed the signs, but the mounties didn't miss us. They radar gunned us and pulled us over. Sadly they were in winter uniform. I wouldn't have minded the fine so much from a pair of red coated picture-postcards. They said that seeing as it was a construction zone the fines were doubled, so even though we were trying to do 2 kn/h less that the speed limit, they fined us for going 56 km\h over it! Bugger! $333 fine. No excuses here, we should have seen it, but that REALLY put a crimp in our journey.

Nothing could improve our mood. Until we got to Drumheller and drove past a series of Gay-ly and gaily painted dinosaurs, mammoths and sabre-toothedtigers. That helped. Then we went to Boston Pizza and I had Chicken Tandoori Pizza. Not as good as Croma in Leeds, but pretty special.

After our pleasant trip around the museum we headed out to the Hoodoos where we watched the sun go down, something I always try to do on the day when the clocks go back. It's a nice way to spend the extra hour. As the long rays of sunset hit the sandstone of the Hoodoos the ruddy rocks came alive. These fabulous eerie formations left behind when the soft rocks wear away under the firm cap (see your local geologist for details) are a regular postcard feature in Alberta, and I hope you can see why.