Home from the North

September 16-20, 2011
My cousin Carolyn and her family live about 45 minutes north of Chicago in a suburban oasis. On the road there we passed every chain store known to man. When you turn into her neighborhood, you find yourself magically transported to an enchanting rural environment with beautiful homes and beautifully-landscaped yards.

After so many months on the road, it was relaxing to hang out with family for a couple days and “catch up”. Dylan patiently tried to teach me a video game (Madden), but I was hopeless. Both he and his brother Riley are football players, and I was able to watch Riley play in a high school game one morning (while David stayed behind to fix the caster on the trailer).

Our short visit was soon over, and we set the GPS to “home”. We drove from Illinois straight to Indiana and found a WalMart to spend the night. We parked behind the store and semi trucks came and went throughout the night, unloading their WalMart cargo, but I slept through it.
The next day we drove through pretty country in Kentucky and West Virginia. West Virginia was very mountainous where we were. We got to the Beckley WalMart after 4 and parked far from the store. I hiked in and got permission. David rented a movie from Redbox. We had a hard time believing we’d be home the following day.
After dark, a blue pickup truck parked right behind the trailer, uncomfortably close, since we were in a huge, empty parking lot with several street lights. Three people were in the car--a woman and two young men. The woman was reading, presumably by the light of the streetlight. They were there about two hours before leaving. There was only one other RV in the parking lot.

Happy to be home

The phone rang while we were watching the movie. I looked at the number, but it was a 1-800 number, so I didn’t answer.
The next day, as we were driving, my phone rang again around 10 am. It was the same number, so I answered. It was VISA.
“How are you?” the woman asked.
“I’m fine,” I answered.
“I’d like to verify a couple purchases you made.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Did you spend $1.07 at Redbox yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Did you place a mail order purchase at Ann Taylor in New York for $1,946 yesterday?”
“No!”
“We believe your number has been stolen. We’re going to close your account and send you new cards with new numbers.”

We assume someone harvested the number when we rented the movie.
From Beckley we drove about 4 hours through pretty landscape in West Virginia and Virginia and got home in North Carolina around 3:00 to find the house intact and unoccupied except for fat, happy spiders and dead bugs.
We'd been gone 119 days and driven 15,000 miles. Mission accomplished. All in all a great trip!

The Badlands and Beyond with Mustard On Top

September 8-15, 2011
After a couple weeks of beautiful Rocky Mountain scenery, we were ready for the Badlands. At US Customs, an agent went into our trailer and came back with a bag of red bell peppers and green onions. He said that the peppers were grown in a hot house in Canada and could have a fungus or something else. He didn’t explain about the onions.
Then we were in Montana. We drove all day, first through mountains, then hills, then ranches with cattle and horses. It got up to the low 90’s. The landscape got flatter with fewer and fewer trees until it was almost a blanket of golden yellow grasses and grains with ranch houses and barns few and far between.

The next day we drove to Fort Peck. The scenery was mostly flat or gently rolling hills covered with farmland or prairie with low mountains in the distance. I saw a few antelope at one point. When Louis and Clark came through here, the area was teeming with bison, elk, antelope, beaver and other animals. The settlers and buffalo hunters took care of that. Many of the towns we passed through had grain elevators beside the railroad along the main road. We also saw grain elevators off in the distance. It was a nice, hot, sunny day, a bit hazy.

We got to Fort Peck just as the last tour was starting at 1:00, so we took it. The guide showed us the dam’s powerhouses, explained the construction and mechanics and allowed us to touch the rotating shaft of a generator. As we gazed at Fort Peck Lake, the 5th largest man-made lake in the U.S., we could see huge paddlefish swimming around.

After that we checked in at the nearby campground with its spacious sites, big grassy lawns and nice old trees. The cats had a blast chasing bugs in the grass.
We returned to the interpretive center and looked at its extensive displays on the dam, the ecosystem and dinosaurs. Then we drove to the spillway.

The following day we drove about 4 hours to Medora, North Dakota. The topography varied from bumpy with buttes to flat farmland with a few small towns here and there. Mostly it was empty-looking land with far horizons under clear skies, restful to the eye. As we got closer to Medora, the badlands predominated.

Medora is small and touristy but quaint. The campground wasn’t particularly appealing to us or the cats, just a bunch of RVs packed in tightly. We were in a spot with no trees or bushes, just some grass and nothing much for the cats to look at, but we did get full hook-up for a change.

After set up, we went to the tourist center and then the ticket office to see if we could get discount tickets to the long-running, outdoor Medora musical, for which Medora is famous, but the tickets were too expensive for our budget. Instead, we watched a free “cowboy shootout” in town later. It was a hokey skit with a flimsy “plot” in which a bunch of cowboys get shot for no good reason. We went to a museum and learned about Harold Schafer, who founded the Gold Seal company and sold “Mr. Bubbles”. He used the money he made to buy and refurbish most of Medora and start the musical.  On the way back to the campground, we watched about 6 hot-air balloons being inflated.

In the morning we spent 4 hours on the 36-mile scenic loop through the Theodore Roosevelt National Park South Unit.
We saw prairie dog towns,
lots of bison, a small herd of feral horses on a hill and

expansive views of badland buttes.

We stopped at all the viewpoints, hiked several fairly short trails and enjoyed the hot weather.

In the afternoon we viewed the exhibits in the visitor’s center, learned about Teddy Roosevelt’s visits to the badlands, toured his cabin and looked at ruins of an unsuccessful meat-packing plant.

The following day we left, stopping at the Painted Canyon Visitor Center on the way out of the park. It has a trail and great views, but the weather had turned cold, windy and overcast, and the grey skies dulled the colors of the normally colorful badlands.

We continued on to Bismarck, passing mile after mile of cornfields and sunflowers. In Bismarck we caught a tour of the state capitol, a tall, skyscraper building with a marble and art deco interior.

From there we walked over to the ND Heritage Center, a comprehensive museum about the history and peoples of ND with an intact mastodon skeleton to boot.

The next day we drove by more sunflowers and cornfields and other crops we couldn’t identify. We entered Minnesota where the landscape got hillier with more trees, lots of small lakes and picturesque farms and farm buildings. Long straight rows of yellow corn with red barns in the distance were set off by a baby blue sky with “boat” clouds floating by. Picture-perfect scenes of which I have no photos continued the next day through Wisconsin. The woods thickened as we approached Maple Grove. We shopped at Trader Joe’s in a huge outdoor shopping area, then CostCo, then Lowes and drove a few more hours to our campground in Lodi.

We spent the next morning at the National Mustard Museum in Middleton. The drive there was so pretty and scenic, I could have stopped every few miles to take photos, but we were towing the trailer and didn’t stop. The museum had videos about mustard, historical exhibits and dozens of mustard jars and serving pieces. We tasted at least 25 mustards and bought 9 jars. You would be amazed at the variety.
After that we went in search of lunch and turned into a small shopping center before realizing we were stuck, with no place to park or turn around. Fortunately, a parked truck left, leaving us room to park. We bought our sandwiches and then David backed the trailer out of the tiny congested parking lot with a right angle turn while people watched. He did so quickly and without incident except that one of the casters struck the curb and came off. I ran back and got it.
The campground was about 12 miles away, but when we got there, we found a few RVs in a mobile home park but couldn’t find the office. No one answered when I called. We drove around and eventually found the office, but a note on the door said the manager was out sick, and there were no instructions for self-registering, so we left.
We went to the only other campground I knew about in Madison and self-registered but we were a bit far from downtown. It was late, so we ended up shelving other Madison sightseeing for another time since we were leaving the next day.

Out of Alberta (Banff, Calgary and Waterton)

September 3-7
Banff is a resort town (as well as a national park) overflowing with tourists, especially on a holiday weekend. We had only one day to see it and the vicinity.
It was a cold, clear morning. We set off to see nearby lakes and other points of interest.

Cascade Ponds is a pleasant lake in a pretty setting. We spent a few minutes looking at it and went to the next stop.

Johnson Lake

The temperature warmed up as we walked less than 2 miles around emerald-green Johnson Lake nestled among the mountains.

Minnewanka lake is big and popular. People were walking, picnicking, boating and hanging out on small, pebble beaches. We followed the lakeshore to the Stewart Canyon trail, which led us through woods to a bridge over a river running through the canyon.

An interpretive trail led us through the now-abandoned coal-mining town of Bankhead. Very little is left of the town, but its history is interesting.

We returned to the trailer, had lunch, then drove through thick traffic into town. Mobs of people sauntered about. We figured many were from Calgary, which is only about 80 miles away. The town is cute and chock-full of shops. We overheard a ranger joke that the most popular tourist activity in Banff is shopping.

We walked near the Cave and Basin National Historic Site, the location of warm mineral springs, but it was closed for renovation. We visited the Banff Park Museum National Historic site, an old wildlife museum of dead wild animals collected over a century ago.

After that we went to Bow Falls. It was so crowded we had trouble finding a parking spot although the parking lot was huge. The low falls quickly turn into rapids.

We tried to visit Banff Springs Hotel National Historic Site, but it was so snarly, we couldn’t find a place to park. We got a quick look at the outside of the hotel.
It turned into a beautiful, sunny day in the high 60’s. Everywhere we went, lots of happy people were out soaking up the sunshine on bikes or on foot.

We stopped to take a quick stroll around Cascades of Time Gardens with its pretty flowers.
Then we went to get gas. It took awhile just to cross the small town because of congested traffic. The gas station was so crowded that we left to find another one, couldn’t find one and ended up back at the same station in a long line. One of the pumps wasn’t working, and they didn’t accept credit cards. So we waited and eventually got gas.
The next day we drove south to Calgary. It was Sunday, and lots of people were driving north, presumably headed to Banff. The Rockies started fading away. Soon we were in rolling hills and pastureland. Then it got flatter and more prairie-like. As we neared Calgary, we noticed a great deal of new construction, with acres of new developments, new roads and interchanges. We learned later that fracking (or hydraulic fracturing, a means of natural gas extraction through deep wells) is creating a huge influx of people because of the jobs it’s creating in the area. The GPS got a little confused by all the new roads and had a hard time finding the campground.
No one was in the office so we picked an empty site. The Internet worked great for once. We went to CostCo, which was a few miles away. The parking lot was so crowded, we had a hard time finding a place to park. We went to PetSmart to get the cats a new scratching pad and stopped at a grocery store. Back at the campground we washed clothes and got the cleanest, driest clothes we’ve had since the start. The campground was very quiet during the day. After 5, people starting coming home from work. Most people were living there permanently although many seemed gone for the holiday.
With our errands out of the way, the next day we were free to sightsee in Calgary.

This was a glorious day, warm and clear, one of the warmest days we’ve had. We went downtown and looked for the visitor’s center, but for some reason, couldn’t find it. We drove around several times, saw some “?” signs but couldn’t find the center. We stopped to look at the Family of Man statues, which are tall and thin and looked rather more like aliens to me. We drove by a festival and tried unsuccessfully to find a parking spot.

Lougheed House

So we went to look for the Devonian Gardens. We found a metered parking spot, but weren’t sure whether we had to pay on a holiday. I went to investigate while David sat in the car. I walked one way and then another. I couldn’t find an address, so I went into a nearby building. It was a huge, upscale mall with 4 floors and a big skylight. People were wandering around. I found the directory and discovered that the gardens were on the 4th floor. I tried the elevator, but it wasn’t working. The escalators weren’t lined up so I had to walk around looking for the way up. I finally found where the gardens should have been, but they were being renovated, so there was nothing to see. I got us sub sandwiches for lunch, which we ate in the car. We were parked under a pedestrian pass, so it was like being in a tunnel. After that we went to the Lougheed house. It was closed, so we walked around its small, formal rather underwhelming garden.

We ended the day at Pearce Estate Park, which has trails around a wetland area and the wide Bow river beside the highway. Lots of people were out picnicking on the lawns and floating down a small set of rapids.
All in all we were unimpressed by Calgary, but possibly we just didn’t have enough time to discover its charm. Downtown seemed clean and tidy and has attractive big buildings, a few parks, and some interesting-looking hangouts and markets that we didn’t have time to investigate. As we drove back to the campground through urban sprawl and numerous high-density developments, we could see a multi-use trail. When we got back, David put his bike in the truck and went on a bike ride while I worked on the itinerary for the rest of the trip.

The next day we left the campground and drove 80 miles to Bar U Ranch National Historic Site, which interprets the history of ranching in Canada. We looked at the exhibits, watched a short video, then walked through the buildings, which are spread out in a ranch setting. It was a hot day in the high 70’s. Some of the buildings had exhibits; others had interpreters. A woman was singing in the cookhouse. She had made delicious oatmeal-fig cookies.
The smithy was stoking the fire. It was smoky inside because the “civil servants” had built the chimney wrong. We had an interesting conversation with him. Among other things, he said taxes, especially on gas, are way too high in Canada.

Next we tried to lasso a “cow”. It took me about 5 tries to get half a horn. David got it in about 3 tries. (Maybe he’s missed his calling?) The cowboy instructing us had been a 5th generation rancher but when the BSE or mad cow disease was found in Canada, the US stopped importing beef from Canada for a time, and Canada couldn’t consume enough of it by themselves. As a result, many ranchers went out of business.

We looked at the Percheron horses, then sat at a campfire with another interpreter who talked about camping on the range and fed us fresh bannock (fried bread), a traditional food. After that we were ready to return and, along with 4 other people, got into a wagon pulled by 2 Percherons. Instead of taking us back to the visitor’s center, which is what I had expected, the driver took us far off into a field beside a stream, stopped, and proceeded to talk to us, a captive audience. I was horrified and annoyed that he was delaying us against our will. I started sneezing non-stop. He asked me if I was allergic to horses. When I said yes, he told me to move to the back of the wagon, which I did. It seemed to help, and I stopped sneezing. We must have been on that wagon 45 minutes before getting back.

So we were way behind schedule and had another 2 hours to drive to Waterton Lakes National Park. It was a pretty drive through rolling, bumpy hills covered with golden grasses. You could see the Rockies in the distance. At one point there were dozens of windmills, maybe to take advantage of the Chinook winds. Cows and horses grazed here and there, but mostly it was empty. Closer to Waterton there were more trees and bigger bushes. The mountains were fairly low, without snow, all bare rock and quite picturesque.

We finally arrived around 6, passing lots of small lakes as we drove in. No one was there to register us, and it was a bit confusing to figure out where to camp, but we found a vacant site. It was crowded, surprisingly so, since it was after Labor Day. The campground was a large, nondescript, grassy area next to a pretty lake with a mountain view.

We had only the following day to see the park. Fortunately, it’s small, and it turned out to be a warm, sunny, windy day. First we went to pay, but no one was in the kiosk, so we went to the visitor’s center to get information on the park. There was a relief map of the park, but not much else. Then we drove the narrow, winding 9-mile, scenic Red Canyon parkway, stopping at several turnouts and viewpoints. It was striking how the prairie and mountains merged. At one stop there was a plaque about bears. A couple in another car were looking through binoculars at some nearby hills. I scanned the hills and eventually saw a mother grizzly and her cub. They were probably eating berries, but they were pretty far away.

At the end of the parkway is the ½-mile Red Canyon trail. We hiked along one side of the steep, narrow, very red canyon and then the other.

Then we hiked about 1.5 miles to see pretty Blakiston falls.

On the way back to the campground we stopped at the Prince of Wales hotel with its dramatic hilltop setting. A deer walked into some bushes in front of the hotel. When I looked, another large deer was lying in the bushes. Since they’re not hunted here, they probably feel its better to be annoyed by tourists than eaten by predators.

Back at the campground I returned to the kiosk to pay. The ranger asked me if I had left her a note. There had been no instructions about leaving a note! She said someone else had registered in our spot last night and wanted to know if anyone else was in the spot. (There was room for only one camper in a campsite.) I said no. She asked me several times! Obviously there wasn’t anyone or we wouldn’t have been there! The system wasn’t letting her enter the information, so I asked if that meant we got a free night. “NO!” she barked emphatically giving me a mean look. She took my money.

After lunch we drove across the tiny town to Cameron Falls, which are right beside the road. Then we checked out the Peace Pavilion, which commemorates the peace agreement and cooperative nature between Waterton and adjacent Glacier National Park in Montana.

Then we drove the Akamina parkway, another 9-mile, narrow, winding road but steeper than the Red Canyon parkway and not as scenic because the trees lining the road obscured the views.
We stopped at the First Oil Well in Western Canada National Historic Site, which had some informative plaques and a tripod.

Akamina Lake

At the end of the parkway is a large parking lot and Cameron Lake, where a few people were out on small boats. We walked a short trail to Akamina Lake, a small, pretty lake bordered on one side by a bright green marsh. It seemed very quiet and peaceful. Then we walked along Cameron Lake a few minutes, read about the ecology of the area and returned to town. We stopped at the gas station and used the rest of our Canadian dollars to buy gas. A few people were windsurfing on Waterton lake, benefitting from the Chinooks.

We weren’t able to see everything the park has to offer and could have stayed another day or two, but we had seen enough and were ready to return to the US.