Inasmuch as cruise ships had returned to Victoria’s Pier 1 with their offloads of tourists in the thousands, and rickshaws and horse-drawn carts had once again commandeered the neighbourhood, we decided it was past time to hit the road. We fled Vancouver Island the last day of May, stopping in Coquitlam to see Lexi and Ben and the grownups whose domicile they share.
One of the things I like about four-year-olds is that they typically haven’t yet mastered the art of dissembling. If you’re unknowingly suffering from halitosis or have a dessicated boogie hanging out your left nostril or are wearing a large soup stain on your chin, many adults – even people who claim to be your friends -- will say nothing and let you proceed on your benighted way; a pre-schooler is far likelier to point out your haplessness thus saving you from further mortification. In the nature of people of her tender vintage Lexi cried when we departed. Mostly it is tears of joy that my departures now tend to generate in fellow humans so it made me all soft in the head to discover there is someone in the world genuinely sad to see me go.
After Coquitlam we spent our first night in mountain-ringed Revelstoke where pal Jan-San provided precisely the anticipated warm reception that drew us to her town. We stopped at Lake Louise, something I don’t recall ever doing before, to revel in the glory of the remote Canadian wilderness together with a throng of several hundred others, most speaking languages with which I am entirely unfamiliar.
Even at my advanced age I am drawn to the ‘lifer’ – something I’ve never seen done before. To that end we chose to invade Alberta via the Icefields Parkway and Alberta Highway 11, which we saw billed as the Alberta Rockies’ best-kept secret. We stayed at a self-styled ‘resort’ quirkily featuring upside-down trees as its signature and a restaurant where a 12-point buck – or at least its head – stared unblinkingly as I ladled my soup while a country crooner wailed in the background.
In the morning, surrounded by fabulous mountain vistas we took our pre-breakfast constitutional, tallying birds as we walked pine woods. We heard the tap of a woodpecker and waited long enough to hear a single call note. ‘Hairy’, I said dismissively, meaning the main-sequence woodpecker in this corner of the cosmos. Jan was silent for a while as I walked ahead then I heard a pregnant ‘Ahem!’ I turned to see her pointing out, not a hairy, but a
three-toed woodpecker. I don’t need all the fingers of one hand to count my sightings of three-toed woodpecker. Jan will dine, justifiably, on the glory for some time to come.
We walked in the footsteps of David Thompson along the North Saskatchewan River at Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site. I renewed my grail quest for war memorials featuring soldier statues, especially gratified to see with my own eyes Frank Norbury’s excellent figure of a Canadian ‘Tommy’ at Red Deer. I took pictures, happily and prodigiously, only to discover many kilometres down the road that I’d neglected to ensure the camera contained a flash card. Complete disaster was averted only due to the fact that, given such a special target, I’d used two cameras for the shoot. Not for nothing did my father frequently assign me an alternate name.
Halfwit.
From Red Deer we headed south and spent much of this day in the Alberta Badlands and in the Tyrell Dinosaur Museum which we found even more alluring than the first time we saw it thirteen years ago. Now we are holed up in Camrose looking forward to another Norbury down the road and, across the Saskatchewan line, a couple of national historic sites devoted to Louis Riel’s ill-fated Northwest Rebellion.
This transcontinental migration is different from all our previous ones: we are no longer ‘Leo & the Taj’. Fearing ever more frequent mechanical breakdowns in the Taj, our Bigfoot camper, we sold it last month and are making our way in this fourteenth season of coast-to-coast migration in the truck alone. Jan may not be entirely happy to have kissed her home on wheels goodbye, but I as principal driver am delighted and if Leo could speak he’d say he’s as overjoyed as a Nepali Sherpa emancipated from his backbreaking load.
One of the things I like about four-year-olds is that they typically haven’t yet mastered the art of dissembling. If you’re unknowingly suffering from halitosis or have a dessicated boogie hanging out your left nostril or are wearing a large soup stain on your chin, many adults – even people who claim to be your friends -- will say nothing and let you proceed on your benighted way; a pre-schooler is far likelier to point out your haplessness thus saving you from further mortification. In the nature of people of her tender vintage Lexi cried when we departed. Mostly it is tears of joy that my departures now tend to generate in fellow humans so it made me all soft in the head to discover there is someone in the world genuinely sad to see me go.
After Coquitlam we spent our first night in mountain-ringed Revelstoke where pal Jan-San provided precisely the anticipated warm reception that drew us to her town. We stopped at Lake Louise, something I don’t recall ever doing before, to revel in the glory of the remote Canadian wilderness together with a throng of several hundred others, most speaking languages with which I am entirely unfamiliar.
Even at my advanced age I am drawn to the ‘lifer’ – something I’ve never seen done before. To that end we chose to invade Alberta via the Icefields Parkway and Alberta Highway 11, which we saw billed as the Alberta Rockies’ best-kept secret. We stayed at a self-styled ‘resort’ quirkily featuring upside-down trees as its signature and a restaurant where a 12-point buck – or at least its head – stared unblinkingly as I ladled my soup while a country crooner wailed in the background.
In the morning, surrounded by fabulous mountain vistas we took our pre-breakfast constitutional, tallying birds as we walked pine woods. We heard the tap of a woodpecker and waited long enough to hear a single call note. ‘Hairy’, I said dismissively, meaning the main-sequence woodpecker in this corner of the cosmos. Jan was silent for a while as I walked ahead then I heard a pregnant ‘Ahem!’ I turned to see her pointing out, not a hairy, but a three-toed woodpecker. I don’t need all the fingers of one hand to count my sightings of three-toed woodpecker. Jan will dine, justifiably, on the glory for some time to come.
We walked in the footsteps of David Thompson along the North Saskatchewan River at Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site. I renewed my grail quest for war memorials featuring soldier statues, especially gratified to see with my own eyes Frank Norbury’s excellent figure of a Canadian ‘Tommy’ at Red Deer. I took pictures, happily and prodigiously, only to discover many kilometres down the road that I’d neglected to ensure the camera contained a flash card. Complete disaster was averted only due to the fact that, given such a special target, I’d used two cameras for the shoot. Not for nothing did my father frequently assign me an alternate name. Halfwit.
From Red Deer we headed south and spent much of this day in the Alberta Badlands and in the Tyrell Dinosaur Museum which we found even more alluring than the first time we saw it thirteen years ago. Now we are holed up in Camrose looking forward to another Norbury down the road and, across the Saskatchewan line, a couple of national historic sites devoted to Louis Riel’s ill-fated Northwest Rebellion.
This transcontinental migration is different from all our previous ones: we are no longer ‘Leo & the Taj’. Fearing ever more frequent mechanical breakdowns in the Taj, our Bigfoot camper, we sold it last month and are making our way in this fourteenth season of coast-to-coast migration in the truck alone. Jan may not be entirely happy to have kissed her home on wheels goodbye, but I as principal driver am delighted and if Leo could speak he’d say he’s as overjoyed as a Nepali Sherpa emancipated from his backbreaking load.
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