Edmonton to Jasper and beyond...

We spent a month just outside Edmonton in a place called Spruce Grove, and I think it’s called the Festival City as there’s not a lot going on!

We went into the city one day for the Taste of Edmonton and tried lots of nice food. The day was so hot I was rather envious of the kids playing in the fountain in Sir Winston Churchill Square

They have a funky building which is the art gallery:

The K-days festival lasts for two weeks and consists of the usual fairground rides, junk food (although we had some of the best brisket ever), a few exhibition halls (think stuff seen at an Ideal Home show) and a couple of sound stages, with each day ending in a fireworks display. The day we went had the Village People on the main sound stage. I’m not sure if I should admit this but I knew all the songs! They were great fun and took the mickey out of themselves, admitting they are probably the oldest boy band out there.

One day we went to Elk Island and saw Bison. Not exactly a herd, but at least we have now seen one!

The Leduc Energy Centre is the home of the first oil well in Alberta, known as Leduc #1, which came into production in 1947. Since then, many wells have been sunk in Alberta and brought immense wealth to the province and Canada as a whole. We also saw a working oil well. No wonder these guys get paid the big bucks – it looked like hard work!

The Reynolds-Alberta museum had a great transport collection including kits on how to turn your car into a snow sledge

And  lots of old farm machinery with some of the biggest tractors I've ever seen!

We also got to ride in a 1927 Model-T Ford which was remarkably comfortable

We then headed 300kms west to a place called Hinton which we used as a base to visit the other half of the Ice-fields parkway and Jasper. Some fabulous scenery again…

Along the way we visited Athabasca Falls – stunning!

We also saw a very large elk having his supper

And a small herd of bighorn sheep.

We spent the next day in Jasper, although the weather wasn't very nice. On the way back, we called in at Miette Hot Springs for a bath with 248 of our new friends. It was so nice and more of a pool setting not like the natural ponds we visited in Mataranka in Australia’s Northern Territory, and not as smelly as Rotorua in NZ. There were two hot pools (38C and 40C) and two cool pools (17C and 20C). I was quite happy flitting between the two hot pools but Mark also dipped in and out of the cold pools and commented that it was ‘quite bracing’. The springs are only open in the summer as the road up the mountain would be quite treacherous once the snow comes. We picked the right time to visit as when we were leaving, the pools had just closed due to lightening!

That’s it for Alberta this trip as tomorrow we start our trek north to Alaska!