Day 15, Part 2: Thursday, May 29th, 2008
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to Calgary, Alberta
Things don't get interesting again until I near the town of Drumheller, Alberta.
Known for its bountiful dinosaur diggings--which I decide to pass on in the late afternoon--Drumheller is also home to the world's largest (fake) dinosaur.
This is not the world's largest dinosaur. Let's call him Dinosaur, Jr.
This *is* the world's largest dinosaur. The cars at its feet may give you some sense of its hokily prodigious scale.
I'm about to pack up and head on down the road when I notice that it's actually possible to climb up into the *mouth* of the world's largest dinosaur. I instantly decide that this is something I need to do, and so I head into the small building at the dinosaur's feet.
A teenaged girl sitting inside greets me as I enter, and it suddenly becomes apparent to me that they actually *charge* people for the privilege of climbing the stairs up into the dinosaur's mouth. I ask the girl how much it costs, and she says that it's $3 per person, but that it's only $1 for kids. A little disappointed, I tell her that maybe I'll come back again some day when I have kids.
Without missing a beat, she says, "If you come back in five minutes," she says, "I'll let you go up the stairs for free if you close the doors behind the dinosaur's mouth."
So that's what I do.
When I get up into the mouth of the beast, there are two little girls there, looking down at the world below. Their mother, waiting patiently for them in the parking lot, suddenly shouts up to them, "Are you going to come down?"
"No!" they reply, in unison.
But within a few minutes, my presence seems to scare them away, and I'm left with the strangest of views of Drumheller all to myself.
In the 80 miles between Drumheller and Calgary, I drift through a floating armada of isolated thunderstorms, hovering over the open plains. A few of them dump sunny torrents of rain on my vehicle as I zoom by.
In the gap between two of these storms, a ray of sunlight hits an isolated copse of trees, out in the middle of the empty Alberta range, and I try, but fail, to capture the momentary beauty of the scene through my car's windshield.
Not long thereafter, I get my first views of the Rocky Mountains on the western horizon, maybe 100 miles away by line of sight. It occurs to me that I am finally living in a place where the scenery gets better, the closer I get to home.
And before long, I'm back in Calgary.
It turns out that my house is exactly right where I left it.
