Alberta: Edmonton & Drumheller

18th – 29th August 2019

Our last stretch along the Yellow Head Highway brought us from our carpark in Lloydminster into Alberta proper and on to Edmonton, Alberta’s capital city. About a million people live here, compared to its largest city, Calgary, which is home to about 1.5 million. Edmonton itself is not on the usual Canada tourist trail but it had a couple of drawcards for us. Firstly, and peripherally, it is home to North America’s largest shopping mall. This was the biggest in the world when it was built, if you include the attached waterpark and indoor amusement park. Of course China has now built something bigger. Secondly, our visit coincided with the Edmonton Fringe Festival, second largest in the world after Edinburgh. We had found a space in one of our favourite types of park, a city park with easy public transport links to Downtown. The small park is in a small leafy valley and is home to a small ski field in the winter and a bazillion mosquitos in the summer. This, coupled with the close quarters of our fellow campers, meant that we didn’t do much sitting around outside in the evenings. We had four full days here. The first day we decided to visit the famous West Edmonton Mall, which was an easy 6km, single bus ride away. It was, as advertised, enormous. We came; we saw the ice rink, the water park, the sea lion enclosure, the amusement park, the firing range, the cinema, the pirate ship, the hundreds of shops and the three food courts; we conquered a coffee, a lunch and a round of mini-golf (victory to me). We bought nothing. Nothing. I have a master-shopper sister-in-law who will be ashamed of my behaviour. (You know who you are.) Then we got the bus home again. Busy day.

The next three days were spent fringeing. Or is it fringing. I am sure it is not a verb, but it is descriptive as far as made up words are concerned. The Fringe Festival was based in a district called Old Strathcona which is across the river from the CBD. It is a cool, hip, leafy place full of independent businesses and is home to the theatre district. It was a slightly more involved two bus, 10km journey to get there, but navigation was facilitated by a very logical numbered grid street system and some helpful locals on the bus. On the first day we successfully arrived in the right place and scoped out our surroundings. There was a great central hub in a small park with a box-office, beer tent, food trucks, busking areas and there were people and port-a-loos everywhere. The sun was shining and we set about the task of working out what on earth was going on, and what, when and where we would like to see. Our booking methods were fairly haphazard but mainly involved the comedy end of the vast spectrum rather than ‘cutting-edge-one woman- modern-dance-and-poetry-performance’ end.

Day 1 :

We saw a slick five person group doing a very funny sketch show. This theatre had a cool bar with a sun drenched patio. Winner.

Next was a stand up show by a very unusually liberal Kentucky born and bred comedian called Stephen Huff. The show was called ‘Darwin vs Rednecks’ and was very amusing. The venue was a small intimate lecture theatre in the Francophone University campus that was about 2 km from the main hub. There was a shuttle bus, but as it was nice day we decided to walk, underestimating the time needed and the heat, arriving just in time for the start. The fringe has a strict policy of no late-commers, which is great if you are the usually rabidly punctual people that arrive well ahead of schedule and infinitely annoyed by less organised people, rather than the people that dashed into their seats in a sweaty mess remembering why they are usually rabidly punctual. Anyway, he was very very funny, the show was more of an intimate tutorial than a gig and well worth the hustle.

After catching the shuttle back to the hub we visited the beer tent and then had a lovely meal at a restaurant across the road. Our seats were in the window which gave ample opportunity to soak up the weird, the wonderful and the frankly plain normal of the passing Fringe-goers. We opted out of public transport to get home and opted into an Uber.

Day 2 :

A near carbon-copy of the first part of the day to get us to the hub at nearly exactly the same time, about 1pm.

Our first show was another sketch show in the same theatre with the cool bar. Bar still cool, performances, writing and comedy not quite as slick or funny as the first lot.

Show two was a one-man scripted monologue of three interwoven stories delivered over a 90 minute period almost without break or pause. He was very good, funny and talented. The venue was a church, so the posteriors were a little worse for wear after an hour and a half sittingin a pew, and about the only time he left his script was to be amused/shocked by his own utterances of the ‘F’ word in such an ecclesiastical location.

Our last show for the day was back at the Francophone University Campus, and we took the bus. Canada’s Frenchness ebbs as you travel in a westerly direction across the country, but every now and then you find a small oasis of it in unexpected places. We deliberately arrived in more much more characteristic time for our show to give us time for a bite to eat at the small cafe here. There was loads of patio seating, live music and it was another lovely sunny afternoon/evening. I ordered a croissant Croque Monsieur, poutine and two beers in French whilst we listened to jazz before we headed into our show, musing on how little distance and time had passed since we were watching chuckwagon racing and dancing badly to country music only four nights ago. This is the same country, right?? The evening’s show was a cast of three- two men and a woman- who delivered a very slick Sherlock Holmes tale, rotating freely through the roles with only different voices and the passing around of a deer stalker hat to indicate who was playing who at any given time. Clever, talented and far too high brow for us really.

Day 3 :

Originally I had thought that we would explore town on our bikes today, but we were having to much fringey fun, so we got back on the bus for a third time and did it all again.

Our first show was a crazy, bonkers one-woman clown show delivering some off-the-wall sex education and pearls of wisdom in true Fringe Festival style. She was hilarious and very endearing, and I wonder if glittery blue eyebrows and lipstick could be a new look for me? We all learned some stuff in that hour…..

Next we saw a very good improv group do a very amusing show. This stuff can be tedious and embarrassing if not done well, but this came highly recommended and did not disappoint. I have huge admiration for this sort of comedy, but it has to be good.

Our last show of the day was another bonkers offering called ‘Thundercats’. This was a musical delivery of the 1980s/1990s Thundercats cartoon characters in the style of Cats, the musical. There was faceprint, big wigs, leotards and plenty of singing. Not our thing, per se, but it was big and bold, funny and polished, and we really enjoyed it. They sold beer in the foyer too, which helped.

In between these shows, we watched lots of buskers, sampled offerings from numerous food trucks and had a beer or several. A jolly good time was had by both and as we headed on our way the next day we thought that we might quite miss Edmonton, although we had only seen a teeny slice of it really.

Next on the journey was an intriguingly named place called Drumheller. This was a little off our natural westerly route, but sounded worth a detour. It sits south of Edmonton, closer to Calgary, and is a town located down in a valley created by the Red Deer River, a scar in the otherwise endless plains. The erosion of the rocks has created a Badlands of striped rocks and hoodoos. It is also an area high in dinosaur fossils and there is a fantastic palaeontology museum here. It is also the home to the world’s largest dinosaur… You can climb up into his mouth, but that sounds like crazy behaviour.

The town is named after a chap called Drumheller, which was less interesting than I imagined and aside from every business and street corner having its own dinosaur-themed model, sculpture, sign or mural, is unremarkable. It is here because they found coal here, and for a time was a bustling, rich and filthy place. Now it has the dinosaurs to lure us tourists in to feed the coffers and it is an occasional film location. There were a few scenes of the new Ghostbusters movie filmed here during our stay, although we missed it. The town is also home to an amphitheatre set in the badlands just outside town. It was built specifically as a venue for an annual Passion play that is put on here, but more recently also been used as a music venue.

There was a ‘famous-in-Canada’ band doing a gig the day after we arrived, and we decided to go along. Rain was forecast, but we were prepared with coats, a poncho for Nick and a natty oversized bin-bag with arm and head holes for me. The support band were great and the rain held off until they finished their set, and then the heavens opened. Unfortunately the accompanying electrical storm made the organisers anxious and we were all evacuated to the enormous beer tent for a hour. Shame! I hear you cry…Yes it was a shame, because the number of evacuees exceed the liquor licence restrictions, so the bar closed. Duh! The weather eased, we were released back into the open, and with much pomp and pizzazz the main act – Walk Off The Earth – took to the stage….. which suddenly went completely silent. We were prepared for rain, but some hapless sound engineer had allowed their sound console board to get drenched in the downpour, and it was drowned. They tried to fix it, but in the end their show was reduced to a few acoustic numbers performed by the six member band through a single microphone. Valiant, but it was not cutting the mustard in a 3000 seat outdoor venue. They called it a day and we all went home.

We did most of the jolly things one can do whilst we were here: a tour around a historic coal mine, a walk over a historic suspension bridge, a meal in a historic saloon, a scenic drive around the badlands and hoodoos (all old, so technically historic) including a river crossing on a historic ferry (been here for ages) and a trip to the fantastic Royal Tyrell Palaeontology Museum (full of dinosaur fossils which I suppose are pre-historic).

We had our historic 19th wedding anniversary here, and celebrated with an enormous plate of fried food for lunch and a walk amongst the Badlands that involved some off-piste scrambling up a seemingly sheer rock face to get back to the car. The Canadians seem to be very relaxed about marking trails, or not, as the case may be. I think their attitude is more: ‘Well, there is some good hiking over there. Go for it.’

Drumheller saw our last days in the prairies. We left town after five nights here, doing a bit of a backtrack to get back onto our westerly route and finally headed towards the Rockies.

On our way we had a one night stay in a park just outside a town called Rocky Mountain House. A whole town of thousands of people is named after a single, historic (obviously) fur trading shop. Quirky. Finally as we moved on the next day we had our first glimpse of ‘ the big pile of rocks’ and suddenly our journey was feeling a bit more like the Canada of postcards.