Leaving the plains

It was without too much regret that we left the wide open spaces of Saskatchewan … you really can have too much wheat and this, the bread basket of America, has very little but. Someone remarked to us “its not as flat as you might think! There are ups and downs!” Yeah, right. Pete remarked when we met him later “your kids could run away from home and you could watch them going for days.” Still, I saw my first bit of proper wildlife, a coyote in the field. They stand out pretty clearly against, well, nothing.
So, we skipped Regina, having being underwhelmed by Winnipeg – hey, except for the fact that Winnie the Pooh was actually a black bear brought as a regimental mascot by a Winnipeg soldier to the UK and donated to London Zoo after the regiment left, thence inspiring A A Milne – and we made for the highest point just inside Alberta purely for the relief of relief … Cypress Hills (and very nice too) and then the excitement started building as the Canadian Rockies loomed ahead. Mountains! At last!
In Calgary, we finally met up with my cousin Pete, at a designated spot at the side of the road. Pete had described his car as looking like a big turd, so the kids mortified us by shouting “that car looks like poo!” at every vaguely brown coloured vehicle pulling into the Radisson. Finally, and actually less poo-like than many we spotted, Pete pulled up. After the obligatory tea and coffee at the roadside (every Canadian seems to have a Styrofoam Tim Hortons cup glued to the palm) we headed off, weaving Doris behind The Turd across Calgary to Okotoks. Okotoks, though it sounds like a kids TV show, preferably by Oliver Postgate featuring cute little wobble people, is actually a really nice town in the suburbs of Calgary, which is in oil and house price boom. In Okotoks 3rd cousins (we think) met for the first time – my cousin’s lovely daughters Charlotte and Jodie. Kids being kids, they all ran off together and “fell” in the river (hey, then they could play in it without getting warned repeatedly about not getting their clothes wet) and had “who can swing the highest” competitions. Pete is obviously very happy in Calgary and its easy to see why. Spectacular mountains, lovely valleys, and ‘proper’ towns … we had passed through scores of settlements along the trans-Canadian in the prairies that have the obligatory Tim Hortons, Canadian Tyre, Petro Canada garage and yes, McDonalds – but nothing else. Okotoks looked like a real town, with character and homes and everything!

Pete casually told us at the end of a great couple of hours that the forecast for the end of the week was about 2 degrees. Now, we had been in glorious summer up until this point. We must have looked a little bewildered/unbelieving, but made a mental note to check the forecast as we climbed up out of the last bit of flat land for several days and many hundreds of kilometres, and headed for Banff.