Since the kids had so much fun on the water slide the previous night, we decided to see the sights of moose jaw in the morning. We remembered seeing Max the moose by the interstate so we made sure to stop and get our picture with him. Then we drove around downtown Moose jaw to check out the cool murals painted on the side of the buildings. It’s sort of something that they are famous for.
Then we hit the road on our way to Calgary. Once again, there wasn’t a lot to see along the way. I had done my research and found what I thought was a really cool beach to have lunch in Minot. Unfortunately it was in a provincenal park without an address. So far I had done a good job of finding things with the help of my van’s GPS (our data didn’t work in Canada.) This one I had no clue, and the kids were pretty restless.
We stopped at the welcome center in Minot to ask for directions. We quickly learned, very few things in Canada are labeled very well. After multiple turnarounds, and lots of second-guessing ourselves, we finally found Echodale beach. It is a very gorgeous park, and they have a swimming lake with sand lifeguards and a snack shack. Unfortunately it was only like 70°, and we are on a timeline, so we decided not to swim that day.
After another picnic lunch and playing in the water for a little bit, we decided to take off for Calgary. We had quite a rain storm and then just terrible traffic as the interstate was routed right through the center of the city. There are multiple stop lights and the kids had about had it. So I pulled over at a little Italian restaurant. The food was great. Everything was homemade from pizza dough to noodles, and it was a great stop to avoid the rush hour traffic we had encountered.
Ideally I would have booked a hotel or Air B&B in Calgary. But a few months prior, the place I had booked canceled on me. I definitely had to scramble and ended up finding a reasonably priced Airbnb in Cochrane. At the time it didn’t seem like it was that far from Calgary, but those extra 20 miles were really hard at the end of that day. The kids were tired, the rain was a little stressful to drive-through, and we were all ready for bed that night. The accommodations that night we’re actually probably the best ones we had outside of Lake Louise. The home was just in peccable, and we realize later it’s because that Homewood probably run about half $1 million if we were going to buy it. We quickly realized the prices in Calgary and the suburbs were just out of this world high.
We just love the little town of Cochrane. It was so quaint and cute. One of many mountain towns we fell in love with on this trip. Nothing open before 8 AM, except one gas station that I was very happy to find before we took off the next day to get Josh. Mom and I did some research that morning because we decided we’re all moving to Canada. Not really, but it was fun to dream. We learned that Calgary only had about 125,000 people in 1967. Now it had close to 1.3 million.
Kenna and Grayson we’re spoiled and got the master suite that night. Zach and I shared a room with Gramma getting her own space. The living room had a giant TV and Kenna took tons of pictures of the inside of the house because she thought it was so nicely decorated. It was nice to be able to sleep in the next day and just do nothing especially in such a nice house in a nice neighborhood.
