Boomtown Trail

Monday, September 01, 2014
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Before leaving Edmonton and heading for Calgary this day, we decided to visit some of the last things on the "to see in Edmonton" list. First we drove through University of Alberta and checked out its campus. They have some really nice and modern buildings and the place seemed pretty nice overall. Later we drove to Muttart Conservatory, an indoor botanical garden with four large glass pyramids. We had some breakfast there and took off for a day-long tour of "boomtowns", small town and villages that grew rapidly when railways expanded in Alberta in the beginning of 20th century.

We drove through several towns and villages located on the way from Edmonton to Calgary, here's a list:
- New Sarepta, a tiny hamlet of 491 people . We didn't even stop there, just looked out of the window at the rural houses and drove on.
- Camrose, a small city of ~17000 residents. It has a very wide Main street with some stores and plenty of parking. There's supposed to be a railway museum, but we didn't look for it.
- Donalda, a village of 259 residents. Its main attraction is the "World's Largest Oil Lamp", a metal structure of 12.8 meters (we went inside of it and signed the guest book there). On the village's Main street there are: ice cream parlour, Canada Post office, Friendship Club (where people play "cards" and "pool", according to the sign on the door), a rusty combine harvester for sale, a youth centre in a barn with a single tiny window, a pub, a restaurant, an art gallery and library/museum. We also saw several horses behind a fence.
- Stettler, a town of 5748 residents. It also had a wide Main street with stores and restaurants. We stopped there for a lunch, but every place place was closed except for a sushi restaurant. Well, we learned never to eat sushi in a small village with questionable facilities, as most sushi were not very fresh and some outright smelly . There was also a tourist information centre, but it was closed for the long weekend.
- Erskine, another tiny hamlet where we didn't even stop, just drove around couple of streets.
- Delburne, a village of 830. It also didn't seem worth stopping.
- Trochu, a town of 1072. We saw an oil pump there, an interesting sight!
- Strathmore, a town of ~12000. Another Main street, more stores and restaurants and tractor dealerships.

While driving from town to town, I stopped along the way and took photos of the endless prairies, massive dark storm clouds, golden crops. We saw fields and fields of ripe grains, herds of cows and empty roads from horizon to horizon.

When we got to the hotel in Calgary it was already dark, so we checked in and went to sleep.

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