Ready, Steady GO! A multitude of miles ahead

It is 8 AM on Wednesday and most 9-5’ers have by now joined the slow, monotonous line of cars snaking their way to their downtown offices where they will spend the next eight hours typing away in cubicles, attend meetings where they will play ‘buzz-word bingo’ and otherwise try to stay on the good side of their bosses.  For us though, there is a different type of workday - ours demanding a solid eight-hour commute - on a multi-day journey that will take us through four provinces by car - Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Our project has a strict deadline, as we need to be in Calgary by the following Tuesday to catch a flight up north to Yellowknife (more on that in a later post). Fortunately, we are our own bosses on this journey - Let the amazing race begin!!!!

Our adventure begins in Milton, Ontario, where Melissa’s sister and our brother-in-law have generously hosted us (and our stuff) since our arrival back from London. Traveling through Ontario was very pleasant with its colourful, autumn, leafy beauty. It was the largest province to navigate through, in total taking three days. We had our nightly ‘pit stops’ in Sault Ste. Marie and in Thunder Bay, where we paused to visit the memorial commemorating where Terry Fox had to tragically cut his run across Canada short. Our travel was brisk, and we didn't dilly dally. Our suitcases were kept as light as possible for this portion of the adventure, so that we could travel in and out of motels efficiently. Our plan was to do all our driving between sunrise and sunset, so as to avoid wildlife that we were warned could be on the road at dawn and at dusk. We were quite happy not to encounter any!  One thing we didn't factor in was that as we traveled north (and eventually west) the sunrise was later and the days far shorter. This, plus the distance between gas stations on these cold, lonely roads was something we had to be mindful of.
 
Our journey took us through Manitoba next and as we traveled further west, the hilly and tree filled surrounds started to flatten out into wide open prairies. There is an old joke about how the land is so flat that you can still see your dog that has run away, two days later. Whoever said that might be on to something. Our next stop was in Winnipeg. Unfortunately we did not have a lot of time for sight seeing, so Melissa suggested that we head downtown to the very epicentre of The Peg: to the corner of Main and Portage. We got out, took a photo, found that in the wind it was way too cold, so we were happy to get back to the relative warmth of our car. 
 
We traveled onwards, trying to get as close as possible to our eventual destination of Calgary. Swift Current, Saskatchewan was our next overnight stop. Not much can be said about this location, from our perspective, except that the motel room was small, yet modern and expensive for what we got. In fact, it had the feeling of a Swedish Ikea nightmare. (Fun Fact - did you know that cows ‘moo’ all night, even after it gets dark)? We were happy that earlier in the day we had made an extended lunch stop in the lovely town of Moose Jaw. We would highly recommend stopping there to anyone travelling through this part of the world.
 
Just outside of Calgary, we stopped at Drumheller, the Dinosaur capital of the world.  We visited the Royal Terrell Museum, where we learned about excavations that had happened in the park around us, and saw the many (almost complete) giant dinosaur fossils. It’s impressive, if you think about it, that on the ground we were walking about, there were dinosaurs as recently as 75 million years ago!
 
At this point, having toured across the Country in super-express mode, we were starting to wakeup and wonder where in the world we were - even what day it was? To break out of this milieu, we headed to the way-cool ski-resort village of Banff, where we would spend two whole nights (in a row!) With the ground having been so flat through the Prairies it suddenly towered up around us into the Canadian Rockies. We were both amazed at the beauty and vastness of the mountains, that in many cases enclosed us in on all sides.
 
Despite being shoulder season, the town of Banff itself is beautiful and we felt an amazing buzz of activity. Colin noticed that every third person that was working there was an Australian. Perhaps surfing and snowboarding are similar? Although we only had a full day there, we used it to explore around on foot and by car. Down by the golf course, nestling between a crop of trees we located what we initially thought was a herd of Moose, but on further inspection it turned out to be Elk. Needless to say we were both very excited about this brush with the wild. Everything around here was amazing and we will have to say that this is the highlight of our trip to this point.
 
As our flight to Yellowknife left from Calgary early in the morning, this meant that we would have to make the 90 minute drive from Banff to the airport while it was still dark. We were really trying to avoid driving these roads before sunrise, due not only to Melissa’s poor eyesight at night, but also - as mentioned - we really were not wanting to run (literally) into wildlife - maybe even one of our new Elk friends that we had made. Never the less, we drove along carefully at about 80km/hr with the passenger on high alert watching for roaming animals. Fortunately the drive was uneventful and we were soon at the airport with time to spare.
 
Next up: Flying High in Yellowknife