Dinosaur Provincial Park

The night at the Comfort Inn was the perfect rest we needed, at this halfway point of driving. The breakfast room was a dream come true, complete with a waffle station! We took full advantage of the warm breakfast and coffee, before we packed up and left the comforts of the hotel to continue our journey.

With tick invasions still fresh on our minds, and knowing we had a shorter drive to Alberta on this day, we decided to find a laundromat and clean our clothes and bedding. Many thanks to Polar Bear Laundry for the use of their machines. We completed four loads and re-packed the car, in time for lunch, before we got back on the road.

This drive was a little harder for me. Although I loved seeing the different scenery and found the plains of Saskatchewan to be very beautiful, the driving part was a little monotonous.

Lily to the rescue, with multiple games of MadLibs, to keep me awake and in good humour through the rest of the province. See below for a screen shot of one of the funnier ones – quite entertaining. For those who aren’t familiar with MadLibs – it’s essentially a game of completing silly stories by filling in the blanks with random words. You are asked to give words like nouns, adjectives, names, adverbs, etc…, then the app puts them into a crazy story that you attempt to read out loud to everyone without laughing your face off!! I still can't read this one without a chuckle.

We reached Alberta and stopped for a quick rest at the friendly visitors’ centre at the border. Not long after that, we arrived at Dinosaur Provincial Park which was a bit like landing on the moon. We went from seeing grassy rolling hills, to driving down into a canyon of “inside out craters” – as put by Sadie. This area is so hard to describe we will leave the job to the photos…

The girls used some spending money in the gift shop and bought a few dinosaur souvenirs. We had a beautiful “rainbow fire” courtesy of Sadie’s purchase of a rainbow fire pack, but we were so tired we could barely wait for it to get dark enough to see a truly colourful blaze. The sun had barely gone down, and we crashed in the tent like a pile of dino-bones found in a nearby archaeological dig…

In the morning, we packed up and spent some time driving around the Dinosaur Park, checking out the amazing rock formations and dinosaur digs, before we headed off for Banff. Oh and by the way, I performed my first solo auto repair just before leaving Dinosaur Park. I noticed that the washer fluid stopped squirting onto the windshield, even though I had just filled it up - found disconnected tubing under the hood and reconnected it with some fist aid tape! Has kept working ever since!