Tuesday September 12th
This was a bit of an errands day. I ran a load of washing through and took the perishables out of the fridge. I wasn’t planning to bring them back into the US, and also I wasn’t sure how long the fridge would run for while I wasn’t driving the van. Someone suggested only 12 hours, but it had run for a couple of days at Yosemite without any apparent trouble, and it seemed to be going the whole time while I was here.
I dropped the van off at the mechanic near my aunt's house, for an oil change, to change the wipers if they needed it (they were a bit of a menace, hardly wiping the windscreen at all, which made driving in the rain challenging!), and of course to replace the leaking coolant reservoir. Heather got us some lunch, and we visited the Walmart in nearby Strathmore, which was quite a decent sized town. I needed a new pair of shoes, and found some Dr. Scholls shoes which seemed to be a good fit, and weren’t very expensive.
Late in the afternoon we visited Wyndham-Carseland Provincial Park, on the Bow River. There was a weir there, with quite a decent flow over it, and big warning signs calling it a drowning machine. According to the signs, if you got under that flow, the water was rotating in a kind of cylinder all along the bottom of the weir, and it was next to impossible to get up for air again if you ended up there. Presumably one or more people found that out the hard way.
We checked out the view from an area high above the river, I think it may have been Warden’s Point, looking across the river, and into the flat area beyond. A lot of the area was quite dry and treeless, though there was quite a strip of trees along the river in places, and the start of some autumn colour.
I usually sleep with a lot of blankets and wondered if I would need more blankets there when the nights got a bit chilly, but I didn’t count on the central heating a lot of houses had, including my aunt's, which kept things at a nice temperature, even at night. There was a big gas heater in the basement, and grills in the floor for the heat to come up.
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