Day 7 - Medicine Hat

I was glad to leave Calgary today for one reason and one reason only; I won't have to listen to that stupid sat nav trying to direct me out of the city ever again (unless we come back...). It seems to struggle with acquiring satellite signals, possibly because of the high buildings. "In 200 yards, turn right, then, turn right... recalculating...recalculating...", all this while we're sitting at traffic lights not going anywhere.

It eventually got us onto the Trans-Canada Highway (largely as a result of me ignoring it and driving most of the way by memory until it could figure out where we were), then it gleefully announced, "continue for one hundred... seventy four... miles". That was it, really. It's pretty much a straight road from Calgary to Medicine Hat. Maximum speed 110 kmh, road and flatness. There are other vehicles on the road. Sometimes you have to overtake one of them, not because it's going any slower than you, but just because you're bored of staring at the back of the same car for mile after mile. Like as not that same car will come past you half an hour later.

I watched two motorbikes at one point, one slowly creeping past the other. That's got to be a weird experience. "Hey dude, you're doing 115." "Yeah, but dude, you're doing 109."

I wanted to come to Medicine Hat because it has the largest Teepee in the world (spellings of the word "teepee" seem to vary, I'm going with that one). We pulled into the Medicine Hat visitor centre at about 2:30pm. I went to the desk and asked if admission was free. "To what?" asked the girl behind the desk. Yanno, when your town is only internationally famous for one thing, you really ought to know about it.

The Teepee is enormous, 215 feet high, and there are lots of informative notices inside it. I'm gaining a real interest in Canadian First Nations culture. When you think of the Wild West, and cowboys and indians, you tend to think of the USA, but it was all going on in Canada too. When we were driving through the plains today I tried to imagine them full of bison, thousands upon on thousands of them, as far as the eye could see... I couldn't do it. I just can't imagine whatever possessed the first settlers in this land... faced with the immensity of it, I would have turned around and gone home.

We booked into our hotel after that visit to the teepee ("are you guys English? Is that, like, the same as German?"), then took a walk into Medicine Hat itself. It's a town of 56,000, and I think most of them were on holiday somewhere else. Everywhere is so quiet! When we were at the teepee the only other person there was a girl walking her dog.

After our walk we had our main meal at a restaurant just across from our hotel, and I had my first Alberta steak (12oz rib eye). It was pretty decent, I have to say.

Tomorrow we move on again, back west, to Lethbridge, prior to our trip into the Rockies. Join us for the next exciting installment...

(By the way, here's the Flickr www again, cos the original one has rolled off the bottom of the page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27605180@N06/)