Educating Risa

Last Thursday the boys and I headed to Swift Current, SK to meet Jim, who was taking the bus from Regina (about 3 hours E of Swift Current) there after his Prairie Developer conference. We then headed out on a mini-vacation of sorts, heavy on dinos and wildlife and landscapes. Despite all of us catching colds, we made the best of things and had a fun time seeing a corner of the world we knew little about. I’ll be blogging in more detail about each location / activity over the next few days, but as I took literally hundreds of photos, I thought I’d better break up the posts. <VBG> Here’s a quick overview of our trip, a ‘teaser’ of sorts. We did and saw many things on the trip, including:

Checking out small town playgrounds and restaurants, hotel swimming pools, tourist information centres and washrooms. Lots and lots of bathroom breaks when travelling with young kids!

We saw lots of wildlife, like these pronghorn antelopes resting in a field near the highway in SE Saskatchewan:

We checked out the T Rex Discovery Centre in Eastend, SK, where we watched a movie, got a guided tour, checked out displays on all kinds of prehistoric life, excavated fossil replicas, had a scenic picnic lunch, and spent generously in their superb gift shop. Highly recommended!

Outside the T Rex centre, and in many other places, Daegan caught bugs for us to examine more closely:

On our way between dino stops, we visited Medicine Hat, Alberta, taking in the world’s tallest teepee, a nature centre (where we got to see a black widow spider!), and two nature walks in Police Point Park: one through “the enchanted forest”, and one along the South Saskatchewan River:

I went for a quick birding outing to Kinbrook Island Provincial Park, just S of Brooks, where we were staying overnight before out big day at Dinosaur Provincial Park.

 

We saw the stunning badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so designated due to its abundance of fossils, it’s “aesthetic” badlands, and its rare, undisturbed riparian habitat. (The Red Deer River runs through the park). Literally thousands of dinosaur fossils have been found in the park, including more than 40 dinosaur species and more than 400 complete skeletons—and excavation continues today. This is the highest density of dinosaur finds in the world. It also has a superb interpretive station with a mix of dino info (including a replica of a palaeontologist’s camp) as well as displays about today’s wildlife found in the park (plants, birds, reptiles, bugs, etc.). We will be going back later this summer—it was absolutely incredible.

The boys also spent time making entries in their travel journals, drawing and writing about the highlights of the trip. Here’s one of Gareth’s entries (“a T Rex named Scotty found in Saskatchewan”):

and here’s one of Daegan’s, about a bug he caught in Medicine Hat:

Tomorrow, a more detailed look at the T rex Discovery Centre.