Oh my God! Canadians are really early birds! At 7am, almost everybody left the campsite, except us, we needed some more time to wake up in the morning😊. Anyhow, after saying goodbye to our friends, we left around 9.30am and started immediately with the nice curvy roads of the Kalso highway. In Balfour we took the ferry to cross Kootenay Lake, and as you will notice on our posted photos, the smoke was really worse that day. There are major fires ongoing in British Colombia and North of US, even Glacier National Park, which we have visited a week before is currently also on fire. You could hardly see anything of the surrounding scenery. During the day, we noticed that we’ve entered again a new timezone (8hrs difference with Belgium), so the day passed quickly. We stopped at a campground in Moyie, again another day passed without direct sunlight… On Monday we headed in the direction of Crowsnest pass and Frank’s Slide. On our way, we saw active wildfires in the mountains, which was really impressive. Frank was a coal mining town which has been hit by a major stone slide in 1903. Half of the town was covered under the limestone of the Turtle mountain, amazing to see all the surrounding stones. After the pass, we’ve left the mountains behind and started driving through the prairies and fields and in addition we saw again the sun and the blue sky. We were very happy😊. The day ended in Standard, a tiny mini town in Alberta. On Tuesday, we paid a visit to the ‘impressive‘ capital of Star Trek, Vulcan. Not much to see, but a good idea and at least the town can survive. After a drive through the prairies and fields we descended into the Canadian Badlands and entered Drumheller, what looked like the movieset of Jurassic Park. We didn’t spent much time on the dinosaurs, but instead visited the ‘Hoodoos’, which looked like small mushrooms (we are spoiled) and we went for a beer and hamburger towards ‘the last chance saloon’ in the ghosttown of Wayne. The saloon and hotel is the only building that left from the mining town. Today we left the badlands and had a last view over them on the ‘Horse Thief Canyon’ viewpoint. We entered Saskatchewan and continued crossing the prairies and fields. Somebody told us that the fields with all the colors and the hilly landscape reminds you to the ocean, which is totally true; the vastness has his own beauty!
