Dinosaur Park

We awoke after an excellent night's sleep in the rather comfy Airstream bed to witness a glorious day. On the way to the showers we passed a few small RVs parked up:

Yup, for we Europeans the size of the North American recreational vehicles is rather unworldly .Just cannot imagine threading one through the back roads of Cornwall. We hitched up the truck to the Airstream all OK, emptied out the waste tanks and headed off. The crew was navigating and the captain was trying to remember that things were now a little different to the trip back from Calgary airport the evening before. We had a "Silver Bullet" hanging behind us. 

Google maps let us down big time, taking us towards the main road out of town but not mentioning that the road we were on was closed. We ended up in a new build housing area on a dead end road. Perfect introduction to manoeuvring the trailer within 10 minutes of departure. Wonderful. Luckily the Canadian roads are way bigger than ours and so we managed a U turn with no drama. Thanks Google maps. 

The rest of the trip was fine, heading East along Highway 1 (the Trans-Canada highway) we were astounded by the lack of traffic. Coming back to the UK and fighting along the congested motorways was going to be a serious reality check. After our "first night in an Airstream and first experience towing one" the captain had another first. Yes, the one road stop around lunchtime had a small Esso filling station to quench the thirst of the big V8 motor whilst towing and a Subway store. So, the captain enjoyed his first Subway lunch. How on earth did he get to this crazy old age without having one before?

Our destination for a couple of nights was Dinosaur Park:

We had a wait to check in to the local government run camping area but it was well worth it. All of the pitches were so well spaced and surrounded by trees, it felt as though we were pretty much alone. We had a "pull through" spot so no tricky reversing was needed for our first experience of setting up the Airstream:

We had power, water and drainage on the pitch so we were totally spoiled. Handy though as it was hot so the aircon was needed. We soon settled in:

broke out the barbecue and celebrated our arrival.

Exploring the area, we reckoned that the scenery was an unworldly combination of rock strata, dried river beds, ancient trees, fossils and much much more. It felt as though we were in a film set but it was all for real and not man-made:

The view from our "spot" was lovely too, plenty of wildlife to watch:

and an uncluttered view out through the trees:

We had to time our walks to fit around the high mid-day temperatures so we had early morning views of the Hoodoos:

What on earth are they - look at Wikipedia link for a proper explanation. The park has plenty of old trees around too and the shapes they leave when they decay are impressive and almost haunting sometimes:. 

Of course, the place is all about dinosaur fossils and as you can see, there are plenty of them:

We were a little open-mouthed when this rig drove into the park. This video gives you a flavour of the size:

and of course it was towing a tiny little car behind:

The Canadians tow a Jeep, in Europe the Jeep would be the tow car. We chatted to the owner later on and he said that as far as he was concerned, Trump had done him one favour - he could now park in Walmart car parks. (Yup, the Canadians are less keen on buying things in US owned stores). Every cloud has a silver lining and all that.

During the hotter part of the day, we had to try out the little on-site café place for an ice-cream. Our mistake was ordering two scoops. That ended up as about 6 UK scoops:

It took the crew 24 minutes to consume it with a nice brain freeze as a result. Mind you, it was very good ice-cream. So much so that we had to try a couple of different flavours the following day.

For our first camping location and experience trailing the Airstream around behind the Tonka Toy tow truck, it was all pretty wonderful.