Shelby, MT to Lethbridge, AB 101 Miles
Another short driving day by design, as we wanted to spend a little time in Lethbridge sightseeing and shopping for a possible cell phone to use in Canada. More on that later, but first the border crossing...
We left the RV park in Shelby about 8:30 am. It was a cool morning with light sprinkles, but the sprinkles stopped before we got under way. It's only 30 miles to the Canadian border from Shelby, and the countryside was much the same as yesterday --more empty prairie. We reached the border at Sweetgrass, MT / Coutts, AB at 9:10. There were only two lanes open -- one for commercial trucks and the other for everyone else. There there were four or five vehicles ahead of us, so we had a ten or fifteen minute wait. When we finally got to the booth (which is like a toll booth), the Canadian agent asked for our passports and then asked a few simple questions: where were we headed, how long were were going to be in Canada, when was the last time we were in Canada, did we have any liquor or tobacco products, and then said have a good day and waved us on through. It took maybe three minutes.
As we drove out onto the Canadian side of the border, the change in the countryside was immediately apparent. The terrain is the same, but instead of empty grassland there were now cultivated fields and tidy farms. Every few miles, excuse me, kilometers, there was a small village with a grain elevator. This would indicate a lot of wheat or cereal grains, but the field we saw all seemed to be hay, alfalfa, or bright yellow canola. I can only speculate, but I'm assuming that because the bulk of the population of Canada is concentrated in a fairly narrow band along the US border, that's why what was empty prairie in Montana, as now farmland in Alberta.
We stopped at a welcome center in the town of Milk River, about eight or ten miles inside the border, and picked up some maps and brochures for things to do in Alberta, then continued on to the Lethbridge, a sizable city of perhaps 50,000 population. Our first stop was at the Henderson Lake RV Park, which is right in the center of town near a large park and lake. We could not check in until 1:00 pm, but we were able to get all the paperwork done so later we could just drive in and park. We then drove to a mall in the city center and inquired at several different cell phone stores regarding pay-as-you-go phones or SIM cards for my backup GSM phone. As it turns out, the Canadian providers don't have a no-long distance plan equivalent to the standard US cell plans, so our phone would be registered to only one city and all other calls would be long distance. By the time you add the long distance surcharge to the per-minute rate, we would be paying just about the same as we pay for roaming on our Verizon phones. So we decided to blow off the idea of a Canadian cell phone. Besides, we can use Skype to make calls to family and friends back in the U.S.
Our next stop was at the Japanese Garden located at the opposite end of the city park from our RV park. It was a quiet interlude; however, it's not as nice as the Japanese Garden at the Denver Botanical Gardens. Afterwards, we drove around town, stopping to look at something called the Brewery Gardens and the railroad "high bridge," which is famous for being the largest and/or highest bridge of its type in the world. It crosses a coulee at the western edge of the city, and is approximately 375 feet high above the river and a bit over a mile in length. (A coulee is a deep gorge in the prairie which is apparently not big enough or deep enough to qualify as a canyon.)
We returned to the RV park and were sitting outside relaxing with a glass of wine, talking with some folks from Edmonton when two RVs with Colorado plates pulled into the spaces next to ours. It turned out they were from Lakewood and Centennial, traveling together to Banff National Park...it's small world.
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