Day 18 - Thunder

Today began with the end of the world. Or that's how it sounded. The biggest clap of thunder I've ever heard woke us both, set off car alarms blockwide, and caused a huge cheer from the workmen on the building site opposite (probably because it meant they could stop working for a while). Like a lot of things in Canada, it was r-sum.

We had known it was going to be a dodgy day weather-wise from the forecasts, but even so it was disappointing when first thing this morning was dark, wet and thundery. We ate breakfast and watched it rain outside, then decided we would go back up to our room and read for a while and see if the weather cleared up.

It didn't really.

But we still had one place we wanted to visit, and that was the Fort Edmonton Park, a kind of theme park that has been created to guide people through the early days of the creation of this provincial capital city. In the end we bit the bullet and drove through the rain to the park. It was only slightly drizzling when we got there, so we boarded the steam train - the very same one that features near the start of the film "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" - that took us to the far end of the park (and thus, back in time almost 200 hundred years), and hoped the weather would pick up.

Fort Edmonton Park is populated with people dressed in period costume, and acting in a period manner. And they do it really well. At first I thought it might be cheesy and embarrassing, but no, these people know their characters well, and they know their facts well too. We discussed with two traders the merits of badger pelts, the cost of range hats (half a year's salary) and top hats (ten year's salary), and the origins of the term "mad as a hatter" (it's to do with the mercury oxide used in pelt preparation). We moved on to the main house in the original Fort (not a military fort, but a trading post), and were invited to sit by a warm and welcoming fire while the head of the house discussed his trading policies with the Indians and with the trappers who came to the settlement. Further discussions with a trapper in the married men's quarter revealed just how tough a life the original settlers had here, often dying before the age of 30, mostly through drowning on the rivers as they took their trade to the giant Hudson Bay (for the Hudson Bay Company controlled much of early Canada), others dying through strangulated hernias from carrying huge heavy loads of pelts, and only a relative few dying through hunting and wildlife-related accidents.

The journey through the park takes you through four distinct sections of Edmonton's history, through the trader years, early settlements, and into the first boom years in the early 1900's (before the Depression at the start of the First World War). It's a fascinating place, and we spent most of the day there.

By the end of our trip the weather had greatly improved, and so we drove out to the odd-looking Muttart Conservatories, a series of glass pyramids and greenhouses holding a vast array of plants from arid, temperate and tropical climates (they were closed for renovation, so we just took a bunch of pictures and left).

This part of the holiday is a bit calmer and low-key after the enormous vistas of the Rockies I suppose, but no less interesting and no less informative for all that. Tomorrow is our last full day in Canada. We intend to take in a bit of the Capital Ex festival, then head out to Vegreville to catch a sight of the biggest Easter Egg in the world, before our 3 to 4 hour journey back down to Calgary from where we started this whole adventure.

Sad? You betcha.