23.05.2012- 23.05.2012   7 °C

Early start this morning, because we left Calgary for the day and headed out East to Drumheller. My new Lonely Planet had recommended that ‘no trip to Alberta was complete without seeing the Dinosaur museum in Drumheller’ (our hosts concurred).

Drumheller is about an hour and half north east of Calgary. Rudy had told us that we had to stop at a particular out-doors shop on our way.. I was thinking, why would we want to go and hang out at another shop?? This shop made BCF and Anaconda look like corner stores!! The store is called Pro-Bass and is geared at fisherman, hunters and outdoors people.. It sells everything outdoorsy that you can imagine (including hunting guns) but in the most amazing surrounds. You enter the store and are greeted by these huge taxidermy animals. Moose, elk, deer, wolves, bears, even birds flying off the roof! There is an indoor waterfall, shooting gallery.. it is just amazing!! All of this plus a huge variety of gear for all of your outdoor adventures!!

We continued out to Drumheller after our shopping interlude (we didn’t buy anything by the way). During our journey the snow again started to fall, this time in quite hard flurries.. The whole way we were all hoping the museum was going to be indoors… no way are we going to be doing much wandering around outside! Drumheller is in the ‘badlands’ of Alberta (I swear that every state on this continent has its own ‘badlands’), which means it is in a dry arid canyon like area (a little reminiscent of Utah). It is the home to the Royal Tyrell Paleontology Museum. Apparently, it is one of the pre-eminent dinosaur museums in the whole world (and after seeing it I concur).

I’ve been to some pretty famous museums so far in my travels but I’ve never seen one with the qty and quality of dinosaur bones. We spent a couple of hours wandering its displays all of which are full of bones! T-Rex, triceratops, stegosaurus, mammoths.. the only major dinosaur I didn’t see was diplodocus (which was slightly disappointing as I really like that one!). It is something to see a T-Rex skeleton.. The Tyrell has three of them and the second one that I saw was a complete skeleton standing up.. It towers over you and the teeth on the T-Rex.. Holy Smokes.. I now do not want Jurassic Park to ever eventuate.. One of those things would eat me in one swallow!

If it wasn’t so cold again today we would have joined in a dinosaur dig! The palaeontologists actually take you out into the badlands to look for your own fossils! (I’m sure you only really find the small shell style fossils, but just imagine if you came across a bone or two??) Anyway, as I said, it was far too cold for any digging so we headed back into town for a bite to eat before heading back to Calgary.

Being our final evening in Calgary, we took Rudy and Jean out for dinner at a Vietnamese/ Thai fusion place. Sadly, the food was pretty disappointing but the company made up for it! It was so lovely to spend time with both of them and finger’s crossed they’ll be back to Oz soon!

Song of the Day– Barney Rubble, Meet the Flinstones! 🙂   (I was tempted to make up my own today.. how does the T-Rex Tango sound?)