Who are these fools who dream of driving across Canada? Just getting from Calgary to Saskatoon is enough to make me mental. It’s been an eye-opening experience for Brayden, too, who’s getting his first views of both the Rockies and the actual prairies. He was impressed by the former; not so much by the latter. (Turns out he, like his mother, cannot read in a moving vehicle without getting sick, so that’s a bummer. Thank God for the iPad.)

We didn’t spend the entire day driving, though. This morning we got to see the the oh-so-awesome dinosaur fossils at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller. We easily could’ve spent more time there if the kids had bothered to read any of the signs at the exhibits, but they just wandered around looking at skeletons. I hadn’t been to Drumheller in over 30 years, so it was basically all new to me too. Very cool.

And now for the family visit portion of the adventure…

Call us crazy, but this year we decided to drive to Saskatoon to visit the relatives. The original plan was just to see Calgary and Drumheller, but we quickly realized that if we were going that far we might as well drive the extra five hours to get free room and board — er, to spend time with loved ones. We’ve been to Toon Town many times, of course, but we generally fly (in fact, Brayden has never done that drive, and everyone should be subjected to it at least once). So we loaded up the van.

Our first stop was at the Revelstoke Railway Museum. We climbed through a couple of vintage rail cars, drove the locomotive simulator, and marvelled at the detailed theming of the exhibits. There was probably two hours worth of information, but the kids ran past most of the plaques, so we were done in about 45 minutes. Then we were stuck in the parking lot for 15 minutes because an actual train was going by — the irony.

It was shortly after leaving Revelstoke that the rain started. And I’m not talking about a gentle sprinkle. It was coming down so hard that it was difficult to keep the van on the road. We passed half a dozen cars that just gave up and pulled over. The downpour continued off and on the whole rest of the way. As we approached Calgary, the clouds to the north were so black that it was like a scene from Twister. We seriously felt like we were driving into a tornado. We made it to the hotel about two minutes before the skies opened up (!) so we hunkered down, had dinner in the hotel and hit the indoor waterpark.

To Drumheller tomorrow…