Dinosaurs and trains
T-rex at the Royal Tyrrell Museum Our next stop was Drumheller, Alberta, which is in south central Alberta and the home of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, one of the world’s best dinosaur museums. You can see hundreds of dinosaur fossils, include this t-rex. There’s one room right at the beginning with some of their best fossils on display like precious jewels.
Hoodoos All around Drumheller are the Albertan badlands, where water has worn away the ground over long periods of time and exposed layers of soil and minerals in the ground. Some times a hard layer is above some softer layers, and thus the softer layers erode more quickly, leaving odd pillars called hoo doos, which you can see in the picture at right.
Waterton Park car pulling into Edmonton station I’m writing this from the Via Rail station in Edmonton. We’ve been in Edmonton only briefly, although I happily had the chance to meet up with my Oxford housemate Jane and take a tour of the Alberta legislature. I’m about to board The Canadian, Via Rail’s flagship train that goes from Vancouver to Toronto. It’s a two day ride from Edmonton to Toronto, but it should be quite scenic and relaxing, especially with no connection to the real world for all that time. We’ve got a sleeping car with a dome on top, so I’m looking forward to watching the Canadian landscape go by; I expect there will be a lot of it!
