Neil's SUP Adventure.......

Neil, Seb and I had first tried Stand up paddle boarding in Whistler and all loved it and were keen to do more. The same day that we took the kids canoeing Neil decided to take a more exciting route home from Banff so he rented himself a SUP for the day. He's done the route before by canoe from below Bow Falls to Canmore. He pumped up his board while I snapped a few photos around the falls and then I watched him paddle off into the wild!  It takes us about 15 minutes by car to get home along the highway but it took him nearly 4 hours to SUP  along the river through Canmore to the bridge just below our house. He told me he ran aground once or twice after taking the the wrong fork in the river and got some good go pro footage of a nice backwards flop into the cold water :)  He didn't see any wildlife and passed just one lone fisherman along the entire route. He arrived home a little chaffed and sore from paddling but happy to have completed his mini river voyage. 

Into the Badlands to see some Dino's.......

 On Friday we drove to Drumheller in the Alberta Badlands. Neil had some work to do there and we figured we would make a day of it and visit the Royal Tyrrell Museum to see some dinosaur bones. After a quick stop at the Drumheller Penitentiary (not usually included in Drumheller's top attractions) we made our way through the strange little town of Drumheller and out into the hoodoos and canyons to find the museum. Drumheller itself feels a little run down and a little too heavy on the garishly painted fibreglass dinosaurs that seemed to be staring at us from every street corner. Of course the kids loved this and Seb even suggested we move there! Erm, no thanks!

Once we arrived at the museum we were actually pretty impressed! It's a very nice, modern, facility and much more pleasant than the prison :) 

 The place was huge and full of amazing displays. The amount of dinosaur skeletons was mind blowing!

It was quite dark inside some of the rooms (apologies for some of the grainy photos) and this had Bel and Seb a bit freaked out at times. Secretly I think they quite liked the spookiness of it all. 

One of the most interesting things we discovered is that Alberta, 60 million years ago, looked quite a bit like Tofino looks now, a coastal coniferous forest of huge cedars and tree ferns! Who would've thought! 

They even had a humid cretaceous garden in a huge greenhouse full of luscious green leaves and lovely smells! I would've quite liked to stay in there all day to give a chance for the moisture to sink into my Alberta dry skin! 

I was fascinated by these dinosaur footprints in the sand. A footprint seems like such a temporary thing and it just blew my mind to think about how these marks have survived all these millions of years!  

It was a fun day and so nice to get a change of scenery. To finish up here's a photo of all (soon to be) 5 of us! Gives just a hint of the craziness that is our little tribe. :)