August 2nd, I broke one of my vacation rules and woke up the kids early. It was actually 8 AM, which I know is pretty late for you working stiffs, but it seems early when there is no bedtime. They haven’t yet made the connection between a late night and a tired morning.

I had good intentions though. We were going to the Royal Tyrell Museum. As we had passed by the museum the evening before, I had noted the extraordinary number of people still coming and going. I had resolved that we would not join that press, and that meant getting up early to be there for the opening at 9 AM.

We didn’t quite make it, but 9:30 wasn’t bad. There was a short, fast moving line-up and we were inside in 5 minutes. Early in the day the crowds inside weren’t that bad either.

I won’t describe every gallery – although I could – but it is a great museum, and huge. After 4 hours we had seen about a third of the exhibits and hadn’t even gotten to the big creatures yet. When we went out to get our lunch from the car, we were shocked to see a line up to buy tickets that extended 200 metres back to the parking lot. Long weekends suck.

After lunch, I signed the kids over to museum staff who escorted them away on a Jr. Dinosaur Dig experience. That gave me 90 minutes to catch up on the blog and not be responsible for anyone. I might have closed my eyes for 10 minutes. Those Johnston Kids had a great time on the dig apparently. They returned from their hike into the badlands quite excited and sporting complementary museum ball caps. The caps are cool because they can’t be bought, only acquired by taking a tour. Afterwards we went back into the museum for couple of hours more. Then our feet gave out.

The Royal Tyrell Museum is awesome, but I do have a bone to pick about the bison exhibit. The display was quite small, just a diorama of a single bison, with a brief signboard. The sign said that the bison had been essential to Plains First Nations, but had been hunted to the edge of extinction and all but wiped out. That was it. When I asked Short Pants what was wrong with the sign, he replied that it didn’t say that the Americans had killed all the bison. I corrected him on the details, but he had the gist of it. For some reason the internationally respected Tyrell Museum declined to specify that it was the colonial economy and white men’s penchant for grotesquely wasting resources that they naively thought inexhaustible that had caused the bison to be slaughtered indiscriminately. I wonder if the politics of the province had anything to do with the museum’s self-serving lack of clarity.

The scenery in the badlands is so interesting that we considered staying for another night, but the pull of home is stronger. We decided to move on, even if it only brought home a few hours closer.

On our way south out of Drumheller, we stopped for a hike around the hoodoos. The hoodoos are sandstone formations that occur when softer stone is overlaid with a harder stone cap. The hard stone cap erodes slower than the softer underlying stone, leaving a formation that looks like a stone mushroom. You often see something similar in gardens after rain, when pebbles can be found on top of little pillars of dirt.

We looked for fossils that we could not keep, according to Alberta law. We did not find any, a consequence that could be equally attributed to geology or the fact that we have no idea what a fossil in the wild looks like.

We went south because I wanted to stay near Lethbridge, in preparation for the next day’s activity. It was a long drive down through the open prairie again. The prairies are beautiful and fascinating to see, like mountains in negative, but I wouldn’t want to live here. I love trees and rock.

Bonus Trekkie attraction! We stopped in the tiny town of Vulcan to snap photos. I am willing to bet that this town’s name has nothing to do with Star Trek, but that hasn’t stopped them from joining in the fun. They’ve built a 9 metre steel and concrete model of the Enterprise, with welcome messages in Federation Standard English, Vulcan, and Klingon. Best to hedge your bets. The Klingons might eventually get over their fear of Kirk, or stop finding Picard amusing.

We finally pulled into the Daisy May Campground, in Fort McLeod, in the dark, natch. We ate a late dinner of pasta and meatballs, then slept like carb stuffed bears.