The Badlands Ghost Towns and Dinosaurs and Paul

So we departed Cochran, and headed east of Calgary to The Badlands. We set up camp at a really nice little place beside Horseshoe Canyon.

Horseshoe Canyon was a beautiful place to explore with unbelievable sunsets and natural formations. During the day, it was pretty busy with tourists but because it was about a three minute walk from our motorhome, we elected to go for a walk inside the canyon nice and early before any people arrived 😀

We then headed off to the Ghost Town of Wayne. An old mining town it’s now a very cool place that requires you to drive over 11 bridges to get there. Once you’re there, the last chance saloon is the place to visit. Built as a hotel and saloon in 1913 it’s the last remaining structure from the mining town days and is a very cool set up and view of things the way they were.

After a nice evening, basically camping in the middle of the desert, we set forth and headed to The Drumheller Dinosaur museum. All of Drumheller is full of dinosaurs. They seem to be in front of every business and on every street corner. Some of them have even ties and hats. Its a really cool way to promote the town, and the museum itself was a fascinating insight into dinosaurs and the dinosaur heritage in Alberta

The entire area of the Badlands is really cool and has some fascinating geological stuff to look at 😀

When we finished hanging around the dinosaur land, we took a lovely drive a couple hours south to a place called Aspen Crossing RV Resort in Mossleigh Alberta. Mossleigh is a large town of 56 people with lots of train cars and three fascinating grain elevators.

Aspen Crossing is a lovely RV Resort that has a lot to do with trains. They have lots of old train cars. They have a steam engine that’s not running. They have a cool old dining car and they have train excursions for a ride in some of their beautiful old machines. We had a great breakfast inside the Diefenbaker Dining Car. 🇨🇦

The next major closest town is a place called Vulcan and anybody who knows anything about Star Trek knows that Mr. Spock comes from Vulcan. This town is similar to Drumheller as it celebrates something and the thing here is Star Trek. Even the street lights are the starship enterprises. There just happened to be a Star Trek convention that weekend and there was a guy dressed up just like Mr. Spock. You’ll note in my photo that Mr. Spock smokes cigarettes.

After some nice walks around the campground and a couple of beers in their restaurant we decided the next day to go into High River.

Beautiful little town where we did some shopping and it’s a bit of a movie town film. The show Heartland is filmed there and was doing some filming while we were there. No they didn’t invite us on to set but when we drove by, we saw a guy dressed up like a cowboy.. Clint Eastwood spent some time there in the 90s and use the old theatre downtown as his headquarters 😎

On the evening of our last night in Aspen Crossing, we drove to Okotoks and had a reunion with my old friend Paul McGregor. Paul goes way back to the scene of the crime at Cronin Fire Equipment in the early 80s. We used to do fire alarms on ships together. When I moved to Calgary in 1988 Paul joined me there but unlike me he stayed. He’s doing well and has his own fire alarm company and a beautiful piece of property that when it’s not smoky, you can see the mountains. We had a lovely chat catching up from over 30 years and a great dinner together.