Day 267: Lethbridge - Medicine Hat
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Monday May 2nd
After a dream-filled night, I woke up at about 8:30am, showered, and headed for the breakfast buffet by the indoor pool. Breakfast was great – there was even a chef making waffles! We loaded up on waffles and bagels and then jumped in the car – me in the driver’s seat – for our first destination of the day, ‘Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump’.
I’d had a brief drive the previous evening, but this was my first real attempt at driving on the right hand side of the road. It’s really odd – it takes you back to when you were learning to drive, having to concentrate on each little thing. At first I kept turning the windscreen wipers on instead of the indicators, since they’re on the opposite side to Australia. It would probably help to be left-handed when driving here, since everything is reversed. The one thing we all had a problem with was the positioning of the car in the road – we kept veering dangerously close to the cars parked on the side of the road. That’s why we had agreed that the person in the passenger’s seat had to be the navigator – one less thing for the driver to worry about – and also give comments on where the car was positioned.
The driving became easier after a while, and after 45 minutes we had arrived at Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump, a UNESCO listed site 16km from Fort MacLeod. Thousands of years ago, the First Nation people used to trick buffalo herds into running over cliffs. The dead bodies would provide food, shelter and clothing through the coming winter.
We watched a fascinating movie about the hunt, and then walked along the trail to the cliff where the buffalos had died. As we walked through the indoor exhibits, one of the First Nations’ employees approached us and spoke at length about the story and the First Nations culture, even teaching us some of the language. He was quite confused about Australia though – he asked if we went skiing in Austria!
We filled up the car with gas and Amanda and Luke had lunch at the A&W, which has horrific American style service. Luke got the iPods working in the car via Bluetooth – the stereo is amazing, as it’s voice controlled – and we sang tunes whilst we made our way back through Lethbridge and onto Medicine Hat. We were in prairie country, with nothing but flat fields lining the road for 100s of kms.
We arrived into Medicine Hat at about 4:30pm, and then searched for a hotel. We got a few quotes on the outside of town, but decided to move into the city centre, following the signs for the ‘Historic Medicine Hat Downtown’. We paid for a room at a central hotel, although perhaps we should have looked closer – there was a sign on one of the windows saying, ‘Henry doesn’t live here anymore. Please stop throwing rocks at the window’ and the tyre on one of the cars in the parking lot was slashed.
Almost every shop in the downtown area was closed, with only a few tattoo parlours remaining and a $1 store which offered layaway (doesn’t that tell you something about the quality of town?) We quickly decided this was a dodgy town and we’d escape first thing tomorrow morning, trying to make Edmonton whilst also seeing the Dinosaur Museum at Drumheller.
After a dream-filled night, I woke up at about 8:30am, showered, and headed for the breakfast buffet by the indoor pool. Breakfast was great – there was even a chef making waffles! We loaded up on waffles and bagels and then jumped in the car – me in the driver’s seat – for our first destination of the day, ‘Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump’.
I’d had a brief drive the previous evening, but this was my first real attempt at driving on the right hand side of the road. It’s really odd – it takes you back to when you were learning to drive, having to concentrate on each little thing. At first I kept turning the windscreen wipers on instead of the indicators, since they’re on the opposite side to Australia. It would probably help to be left-handed when driving here, since everything is reversed. The one thing we all had a problem with was the positioning of the car in the road – we kept veering dangerously close to the cars parked on the side of the road. That’s why we had agreed that the person in the passenger’s seat had to be the navigator – one less thing for the driver to worry about – and also give comments on where the car was positioned.
The driving became easier after a while, and after 45 minutes we had arrived at Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump, a UNESCO listed site 16km from Fort MacLeod. Thousands of years ago, the First Nation people used to trick buffalo herds into running over cliffs. The dead bodies would provide food, shelter and clothing through the coming winter.
We watched a fascinating movie about the hunt, and then walked along the trail to the cliff where the buffalos had died. As we walked through the indoor exhibits, one of the First Nations’ employees approached us and spoke at length about the story and the First Nations culture, even teaching us some of the language. He was quite confused about Australia though – he asked if we went skiing in Austria!
We filled up the car with gas and Amanda and Luke had lunch at the A&W, which has horrific American style service. Luke got the iPods working in the car via Bluetooth – the stereo is amazing, as it’s voice controlled – and we sang tunes whilst we made our way back through Lethbridge and onto Medicine Hat. We were in prairie country, with nothing but flat fields lining the road for 100s of kms.
We arrived into Medicine Hat at about 4:30pm, and then searched for a hotel. We got a few quotes on the outside of town, but decided to move into the city centre, following the signs for the ‘Historic Medicine Hat Downtown’. We paid for a room at a central hotel, although perhaps we should have looked closer – there was a sign on one of the windows saying, ‘Henry doesn’t live here anymore. Please stop throwing rocks at the window’ and the tyre on one of the cars in the parking lot was slashed.
Almost every shop in the downtown area was closed, with only a few tattoo parlours remaining and a $1 store which offered layaway (doesn’t that tell you something about the quality of town?) We quickly decided this was a dodgy town and we’d escape first thing tomorrow morning, trying to make Edmonton whilst also seeing the Dinosaur Museum at Drumheller.
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