Mike and John.

The kids are looking at a carp pond - the museum has a cool garden display, to show what the vegetation would have looked like.

Billy and Vicki - with little William

I probably should have taken this shot at Vicki's place. between too-dim museum lighting and too many distractions, it didn't work out terribly well. But it's the Walchuk kids, with all their Walchuk kids!

It was a cool museum, and John loved it, as we knew he would. I'm glad we were able to take them. They had a lab, that you could see behind glass, and the coolest water display - it was a plexiglass floor, so it felt like you were walking on water. It freaked the kids out. Joan actually fell, because she couldn't tell where the floor was. Dave was just completely freaked out, and got through it by shuffling his feet the whole way.

There were a lot of Japanese tourists. One group of very bubbly girls asked to get a picture of Tom. I'd be a little weirded out, but I'd been through that before - some Japanese tourist went home with pictures of a young John by the reflecting pool in Washington. Not sure what they do with babies in Japan. I know our Korean convenience store ownder in Hamilton said it was considered dangerous to take babies outside until they're about 6 months old - maybe they do the same.

After the museum, we parted ways with Vicki and Billy. We tried to continue up the road to Oyen, but were low on gas, and being evening in rural Alberta, we weren't sure what we'd find, if anything. We pulled over and asked a local farmer, who told us we'd have to turn back to Drumheller, so that's what we did. But it was a smaller town than we expected. The Shell was already closed, so we couldn't use our AirMiles gas certificates. They didn't even have a TD, where we could deposit a paycheque. So we scraped up enough pocket change to put some gas in at a PetroCanada, and raided the cooler for supper. As I recall, it was yogurt and peanut butter on celery, with oranges for dessert.

And that's about where the bugs began. It's been so wet on the praries, the whole place has exploded with mosquitoes. There were so many, it sounded like it was raining, even though there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Our windshield degraded into a big greasy streak, despite constant washing. It was so bad, we had to stop at a gas station along the way just to scrape them down. I got out to look, and the front of our white van was literally black. Ewww.

Despite all the setbacks, we got to Oyen, at about 11:30 p.m. It was just a Super 8, but after camping so many days, it felt like the most luxurious hotel in the world. We had a hot shower in our sparkling white tub, climbed into our clean, crisp white sheets, and Mike said "that was one of the best experiences of my life." I couldn't had agreed more.