Hi everyone,



A few years back, with several friends and my spouse, I got to create a lifetime memory by riding a motorcycle 9,000 miles across Canada and back across the US (close to 50 mpg on the bikes, so I didn't feel too awfully guilty) taking a pretty circuitous route and stopping at a lot of notable places along the way.? One of the highlights of that trip was a large and impressive (and unknown previously to me at the time) dinosaur fossil museum in the middle of Alberta.? Turns out one of the largest dinosaur fossil concentrations in the world - along with tons of tropical and warm temperate vegetation and other wet-and-warm critter?fossils - is there.? The location is quite a few degrees of latitude north of Seattle, and Alberta in the winter today (even with global warming) is?downright frigid.? Maybe I missed a?wing of the museum exhibit, but I don't recall any human fossil specimens in with the mix.? Hard to imagine how it could possibly have been?so dang warm up there - ok, hot, actually - back then without us hominids around to make it so.?



The other unique experience we had in that area on the same?trip was a grasshopper infestation of truly biblical proportions (try some?roads so slippery from squished grasshoppers that they were closed because cars were skidding out of control, and motorcycle shift levers that jammed because they were cemented shut with the remnants of unlucky 'hoppers).? We were waiting for the large flocks of gulls to show up and rescue the area, but the farmers there weren't as lucky as the folks in Salt Lake (for those who may not know, the speculation is that the gulls that saved the Mormon settlers probably?came from the large resident breeding population of California Gulls at Mono Lake).? The rest of the way riding east across Canada we saw truckload after truckload of hay being brought in from the eastern provinces to try to save at least some of the farm animals in the affected part of Alberta.?



Suffice it to say that we wound up with a unique impression of that particular province.





John Tubbs

Snoqualmie, WA

johntubbs at comcast.net


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