Yesterday was a travel day. It was a day that we didn’t have a set schedule, but we did have to pick up the dogs by 5pm just East of Cranbrook British Columbia. I had set a target of having breakfast at 630 and knew this was a lofty goal.

My Aunt, being blind has a watch that reads the time to her. My cousin offered to change the time on it so it was in Mountain Time but Bernie said not to bother, that she liked taking two hours off of it. I’m also going to mention that the clock in the hotel room, for some odd reason, was set to Eastern Time as well, I have no idea why.

The events unfolded something like this. My Aunt woke up and pressed her watch to get the time, it says it was 555am. She knew this was late for us to be ready for breakfast at 630, so she woke Kim up in a semi panic. Kim checked the clock in the room and indeed, it concurred that the time was 555… This caused Kim to mini panic as I had stressed that on this particular day, we were on a very tight schedule. Kim then woke me up in a panic with arms flailing that it was 555 in the morning.

I’m one of those annoying people that wakes up at 💯, unsure why, but I am. I am also one of those people who’s internal clock is bang on and rarely, if ever, fails me. I knew that it couldn’t possibly be 555…

I grabbed my cell phone and confirmed that it was 355 in the morning, a full 1 to 1.5 hours before I needed to wake up. I stopped the panic in the room after revealing this information… In hindsight, it was sort of funny although at the time, who wants to be waken so early. Bernie thought she was trying to save the day. Kim was full of adrenaline and was up and about and I was awake and unlikely to get back to sleep.

We did make it to breakfast at 630, as scheduled. We sort of thought it would be a quiet breakfast with just us in the restaurant but that’s not how it played out. There were several tour groups that apparently had early starts to their days and the restaurant was full, so it was a busy breakfast. We ate and then packed up the room and were off, on schedule, almost unbelievable.

Our first destination on the road was a very quick stop at Moraine Lake (right near Lake Louise) to get a picture of Bernie and Kim in front of a bear, we also used this time as a bathroom break although I could not bear to use the washrooms, Parks Canada really needs to hire people to keep the washrooms clean, wow… We continued our Southern journey towards Fort Steele, BC to get me dogs and only arrived a few minutes behind schedule. We all got home shortly after 5pm. Dinner was supposed to be BBQ steak and roasted potatoes, but I was no longer in the cooking mood, so we ordered pizza from Crowsnest Pass Pizza, everyone enjoyed it.

We had a quiet evening watching the first half of Crocodile Dundee and having some alcoholic milkshakes. We all hit bed early, around 930, hence why I’m awake and writing a blog post at 230 in the morning.

The plans for today have changed somewhat… We were going to go to Drumheller and tour about, but it’s supposed to be very hot (for Alberta anyway) with a high of 33C. So instead, I think we are touring the Frank Slide exhibit in Frank Alberta then heading to Calgary and going to Cross Iron Mills, they want to visit the Sketchers outlet. We are staying in Calgary tonight followed by breakfast tomorrow at Denny’s then a drop-off at the airport for 11am for their 1pm flight.

It’s been a great week, but a tiring week, to be sure. I’ll have Sunday to recover before returning to work on Monday. I’m looking forward to getting back to a normal routine and I’m sure that the dogs will say the same. I’ve gotten to know Bernie and Kim a lot better and I’m looking forward to them hosting me in October and November when I visit Ontario. I hope they’ve enjoyed themselves here, I know I have, it was a great week.