Day 5

We used Oyen as a recharge base. We did some laundry at the hotel - enough to have everyone back in clean clothes. While we did that, the kids gorged on the continental breakfast. We brought plate after plate of muffins, waffles and eggs up to them. After such a light dinner, they were starving. I think all told, we ate a dozen hard-boiled eggs alone. Then we headed into town to finish our laundry, and get John a haircut. This picture is of the kids playing "choo-choo" -Dave's favourite game. Although it looks like they're having fun, they were largely bored, and were at each other for hours, and they each spent most of the time in time-outs just to keep them apart.

 I took John for his haircut. This is his "before" - at least the closest he'd let me get to a before - or an after for that matter. As I said, it was a rough morning, with a bunch of bored, grumpy kids. He got his haircut in a girl's basement - the salon downtown was all booked up, so we looked online, made a few calls, and found a girl named Darcey, who had turned her basement into a studio. She was nice until I mentioned we were going home to Ontario. I had forgotten I was still in Alberta. To thaw her icy glare, I spent the next few minutes explaining how we're NOT southern Ontario, and we're actually closer to Calgary than Toronto. She warmed up a bit after that, but she never treated us the same again.

Oyen is pretty close to the border - another province down!

Straddling the border is a town called Alsask. It's an old army base, with a radar tower, shown here. It's a relic of the cold war - it formed an early warning system to search for Russian missiles headed for the US. The town that grew up around it nearly died when the bas was closed down. It went from 800 people to its current 150 or so. A lot of the buldings rotten away and were torn down. But instead of just letting it be, the town errected signs to commemmorate where each building once stood, and what business or family home was there. It was really eerie. There were ghosts of old city parks and playgrounds, and it once had a busy little downtown. Now there's just a few houses, and signs to mark the rest, with an abandoned base with barracks and offices nearby.