Canada 2016 - Medicine Hat to Eagle Valley Park

Friday - July 1 - Canada Day
We have thoroughly enjoyed our time in Alberta but it is time to move on to Saskatchewan. Not everyone is on vacation but everyone is in a festive mood.

Almost every morning we hear this little bird with a short, sharp chirp. It tends to vocalize in sync with our pedal strokes so that the first time we heard it, we thought there was a problem with one of our bikes. Now we just call it the Bottom Bracket Bird.

This is what semi-surfing looks like. Most trucks do move over to the left lane, which limits its effectiveness. Particularly if the truck blocks a quartering headwind the effect of that combined with their air vortex can add a couple miles per hour in a split second if you time it right and are ready to pedal.

As much fun as that can be, no wind is much preferred to a headwind!

We aren't sure when this happened but the way the wind blew last night it could be really recent.

Alberta has a bunch of these Road Turnouts with beautiful interpretation signs and trash cans but only 2 places had bathrooms all the way across the province. Probably not much of a challenge for male cyclists but not many places to have a little privacy for a female cyclist.

The closest we've come to seeing a buffalo is the ubiquitous Bison Transport semis that we've seen that past few days.

There are a lot of these ponds with lots of birds. As we approached this one,  a hawk flew right over our heads, gave out a cry then landed in one of the trees. We stopped for some pictures of the area not thinking much about it.

What you don't see is that hawk flaring right behind Doug and just over his head as he started pedaling. It happened so fast and was so awesome.

We got to the Walsh Welcome Centre on the very eastern edge of Alberta in time for lunch.

There was a nice picnic area with shade.

Inside they were celebrating Canada Day with free cake, punch and coffee.

Megan made sure Doug had some fresh coffee and gave us a special cyclist goody treat after we signed their cyclist log book,

Goodby Alberta, Hello Saskatchewan.

Changed provinces but not scenery, at least not yet.

Cattle ranching is big here too.

Our home for the night is Eagle Valley Park Campground. Someone moved out early so we got a tent site with a table. Otherwise we would have had a shady spot in the overflow area but no table.

It is plenty warm and we wanted to make sure we had plenty of fluids.

Locals Gus and Doris were at the next table at dinner. We had a delightful chat with plenty of good-natured ribbing from Gus. At first he thought we were from Manitoba!

Andrew is from Auckland, New Zealand. He is headed to Winnipeg too but by a slightly different route. He has bike toured all over the world. Especially interesting was his trip from Budapest to Beijing. Everyone else was in the lounge listening to the live band (Canada Day special) so we chatted for quite awhile since no one needed our table.

In fact all the clothes were dry by the time we got back to our site. The band did play until 11:00 as billed but it was very quiet after that.