Wayward Newlyweds – Day 11 Head-Smashed-In/Swift Current

You Can’t Have Everything

We had a late start due to the late night we had. We got up around 9:30, and both had showers before packing up. When we started packing up, we discovered that it was raining rather heavily. Dodd sprinted out to the car and retrieved our rain jackets. Slightly fortified, we went about packing up in the rain…it was not a pleasant experience. We got it done though, and headed on our way back toward Lacombe around 11:00. We stopped at Toller’s again…because doughnuts…and coffee… It was miserably wet for a good long way, but not as windy as it had been. We drove through on and off heavy rain, drizzle and spitting. Eventually the clouds started to break up on the outskirts of Calgary.

The drive was nice and easy, not too much to say about the scenery. Really when you have seen part of Alberta you have seen most of it. Lots of fields on fields of wheat, canola, occasional sugar beets, and possibly yarrow??

We dove pretty deep into some Critical Role that I had downloaded from Youtube and have a pleasant drive. We got to Head-Smashed-In around 3:45pm (a fair amount later than we had originally intended), and went to have a look. The sign at the gate said open 10-5 but at the entrance to the center there was a sign saying Summer Hours 10-6 so we figured we had a good amount of time to poke around.

In truth, once I was in the center, I was having memory flashes, and not much had changed. We went up to do the short ridge walk. It was pretty cool, and on our way back we had a marmot cross our path! We went back into the center and started our poke around tour. Around 4pm there was an announcement saying the last showing of the info film would be at 4:30…not too much of an issue to us, but a bit weird considering they were closing at 6. We kept poking around, and around 15 minute later they announced the gift shop was closing…also weird…so we went there and had a quick look, didn’t see anything interesting. At this point we were feeling very rushed to get out as it seemed like a lot of the employees were closing things down and clearly getting ready to get off shift. It wasn’t a very nice atmosphere to be looking at museum things, so we decided to head out. At that point we were hungry, and had been deprived of possible bison burgers as the cafeteria closed at 4pm. We made quick pb sandwiches and had some fruit for dinner and tried to come out of the unpleasant feeling of being hurried out.

Happy to get back on the road, we decided to continue with Sabriel and drove on! Around 7:00pm we crossed the Saskatchewan border and were on track for Swift Current. We got to our rest stop around 8:30pm when it was just getting a bit dark. The place we sated was just off the highway, but nicely sheltered from view, with a big green space, and lots of little individual ‘picnic’ areas with room for a tent. In fact, we had a few neighbour doing just that!

Overall, a good driving day, but a bit disappointing in terms of sight seeing. But hey, you can’t have perfect days everyday. We headed to bed shortly after getting set up. It took me a bit to get to sleep, but when I did, it was peaceful.

Cheers

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