We've travelled nearly two and a half thousand miles in Canada, and encountered two roundabouts, one in Canmore and one here in Edmonton. There's no two ways about it, going around a roundabout "the wrong way" does your head in. Stick with the grid system is what I say.
Today we travelled out to the West Edmonton Mall, or WEM. The guide book says that there's no place quite like it in Canada. There's a place a little like it in Manchester, and it's called the Trafford Centre, but the Trafford Centre doesn't have its own pirate ship, nor its own whale, nor its own sea with a beach. WEM is truly enormous. At first it just seems like any other shopping mall, but as you get deeper into it it seems to get bigger and bigger. It's amazing what they've created.
We spent the morning there, then travelled back to the hotel, stopping only to visit the largest cowboy boot in the world. We dropped H off, had a small snack at a place across the road, then headed out to Old Strathcona, a section of Edmonton south of the North Saskatchewan River. This is a place of contradictions, containing some of the oldest buildings in Edmonton, as well as the famous (?) Whyte Avenue, where a lot of the bars and live music places are. It was a beautiful day as we crossed the High Level Bridge into the south part of Edmonton. This bridge has a fountain built into it that is activated on special occasions, producing a waterfall that has a longer drop than the Niagra Falls.
We had a beer on Whyte Avenue, then realised we'd missed the last tram back from Strathcona to the Legislature Building near to our hotel (this building is the capital of the provincial government, equivalent to our own Houses of Parliament I guess). So we had to walk all the way back, a distance of, ooh... miles.
Tonight we ate at the Madison Grill, and it's the first time we've had what I would call "sensible portions", i.e. something we could actually finish off. It was a beautiful meal too. Then we came back to the hotel and started trying to finish off all the booze we've bought since we got out here... it may be a late start tomorrow.
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2 comments:
AAaaaaaaaagh!
Roundabouts!
I too wake up in a cold sweat thinking of right handed roundabouts...
There's one at the junction on I70 where you come off for Frisco in Colorado.
Luckily you never meet another vehicle on it.
They truly are like going into a different dimension. I mean driving on the right, it's no big deal after about the first three or four junctions, you soon get into the swing of it. But when your sat nav says, "in point eight miles, enter roundabout", I defy the bravest man not to whimper a little.
"So I'm going anti-clockwise, right? And I need to give way to traffic... from the left? And I need to be in what lane exactly?"
The thing is, there seem to be so few roundabouts in this country that even the canucks are phased by them, so everyone is in the same boat.
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