Today marks the first day of stage two of the summer adventure. After seeing my mom and Sarah off back to Guelph last night, Sid and I set off north from Calgary to Edmonton to join up with Elizabeth.
It is a straight, flat drive with the road lined by golden canola and green hay fields, with grazing cattle and horses, and with a lot of huge RV dealerships. Who buys all these things? We had out wheels re-torqued in Red Deer, which occasioned all the guys in the sales office coming out to look at the truck, ate lunch on the lawn at the Timmy's, and admired the flower gardens in the centre of the city before moving on.
While doing our shopping in Edmonton on the way in we discovered many things - Edmonton has the largest Canadian Tire store in Canada - two stories, with separate escalators for the shoppers and for their carts; that you need to register bottles of bear spray with their individual serial numbers so if you assault someone in an urban area the sale can be traced (note to self - when assaulting someone with bear spray in an urban area DO NOT leave the bottle behind), that Costco Edmonton does NOT sell tonic water (and why-ever not?), but they do have really inexpensive propane refills that you pay for in the cigarette cage - an unsigned little cave of a place next to the main entrance manned by a rather grumpy, shady looking character.
We managed to find Elizabeth's apartment without trouble, Dolores (the truck's GPS) and my phone GPS actually agreed on where she lived, dipped into the tonic that we eventually tracked down, and then headed out on Whytes Avenue for dinner at a burger place, and then to the Edmonton Highlevel trolley which Elizabeth had bought tickets for - a cancer fundraiser. People (not us) dressed up in flapper costumes, we rode an old trolley (from Melbourne Australia - very confusing at first looking at the names of the stations it serviced in its real life) out to the middle of the High Level Bridge over the South Saskatchewan river, and then we drank cocktails for a while (not too long - no bathroom on board!), and then went back home again. A very satisfactory day.
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