Tuesday, August 7 – Ramada, West Edmonton

Eek, there are a couple of buses of Asian tourists staying here too, wonder what the bunfight will be like for breakfast?  No worries, they have all been and gone so we only share with other couples and families.  Kim’s makes an observation – we have seen a lot of Indians (the Hindu turban wearing type) but Canada is well known for taking in refugees from all over.

We are on the road by 8.15am, the view of the mountains somewhat obscured by the smoke haze from the nearby fires which follows us all the way to Edmonton.  The river running beside us is an obvious milky turquoise and the jagged peaks look faded.  Not many good photos taken today.

 

We get to the Jasper National Park and see a huge stag with a full head of antlers grazing beside the road.  No fee to enter the Park as we are just driving through. We are held up for about 15 minutes by road works within the park and are then lead through the loose seal by a minder to make sure we don’t go over the imposed 40kms/hour.

Not very clear sorry, thru the bugriddled windscreen at speed with little notice

Hazy rocky mountains!

We stop at the town of Jasper for a look around and a tank of fuel, we are getting 47.7 mpg! Then stopped again at Edson AB to refuel Kim’s tummy.  We crossed over the state line with no hoopla and also went through a time zone so we gained one extra hour today, however temporarily.

Very smoky from local forest fires

We arrived at the Ramada in West Edmonton at 3.10pm, about 45 minutes earlier than CoPilot suggested even with the time change, so we are happy to get out and stretch, it has been a long day sitting.  We are happy with our room, it is ready, an hour before check in time.  A 4pm check-in is common here, don’t know what they do with the time between check-out and the next lot!

We phoned Murray and let him know we have arrived safely and arrange to catch up tomorrow evening at his place for Ribs and Baked Potato – all my faves and to catch up with some others from our camping adventures here back in 1980.

After a bit of a rest up we go for a drive around Edmonton to see what we recognise.  After a block of two we ended up right outside my Brother Bryan’s apartment where we lived when we stayed with him back in 1980.  Looks just the same!  Then we drove around the city crossing a couple of the bridges we remember and all in all had a lovely trip down memory lane.