Canadian Holiday
- Day 3 : Wednesday 10th September
Mum and Dad Harris’ anniversary day saw us setting off for our first long drive, along Route 2 from Calgary to Edmonton. The morning was fairly uneventful, and the scenery up to Red Deer fairly nondescript – but, as before, typical of the terrain my great-grandfather had to try to farm. We settled down to what we knew would be a long drive; cruise control on the rental car came into its own. The road traffic was, by UK standards, extremely light – plenty of times we had a dual carriageway to ourselves, but there were some very large lorries from time to time.
Red Deer was roughly halfway, and cousin Len in Australia had told us it would be a good place to stop for lunch – it was where the trees start, he’d said, and indeed by Red Deer the scenery was more wooded than the plains scenery around Calgary. We pulled in to a parking area for lunch, and found a sort of ranch museum, with a café attached that sold coffee and muffins. Then we found our way back onto the main road (eventually) and headed further north. A little further north, the need for petrol made us take a slight detour, and so entered LeDuc by a back road, which let us discover a Dairy Queen establishment (unheard of in most of the UK, so new to Katie); we also pottered around a bookshop. Then on via side roads to Devon and onto highway 16a West of Edmonton, leading us eventually to David and Eulene’s house West of Stoney Plain. We had used an online map in the UK to plot where we thought the house was, based on Eulene’s description, and it was exactly where we had deduced.
We can’t remember all we said and did that evening; time flew, and we caught up with so much news and shared news and photos.