Our Alberta

With one day off a week these days, we really treasure our Sundays as time together as a family. 

Yesterday we slept in, went out for breakfast, bought a couple of new clothes for E, and then went for a long drive in west central Alberta. 

We had a location where we needed to end up (the Danish Canadian National Museum at Dickson, where I did a bunch of my research and am still involved) but we didn't have a time limit. 

We had a backroads of Alberta mapbook, and we took secondary highways, machinery roads and gravel for most of the way (our poor car sadly needs a wash now...)

I love Alberta.
The old barns in various states of disrepair (or repair).

Memorials to towns and schools and communities no longer there.

Fields of richly coloured crops almost ready for harvest.

Hills and valleys, drumlins and eskers, creeks and rivers, lakes and swamps and dug-outs.

Places that still reveal traces of the settlers' European heritage.

Places that remain relatively untouched, containing native plant species that are becoming more and more rare.

We live in a beautiful province, made especially beautiful by the season of full bounty awaiting harvest. 

It was a refreshing break from our little plot of mud and clutter and hard work.