Alberta and mountain time!

Alberta dawned a bit grey and damp, but we didn't get rained on as we de-camped in a hurry after oversleeping either because of a failed alarm clock or operator error -- we'll never know. 

On the topic of clocks and time, a correction to a previous post. One of the confusions of time zones that we finally figured out is that Saskatchewan doesn't do daylight savings. So when our iPhones went back an hour we thought that we'd crossed into Mountain time, which seemed a bit too soon. But it ain't so. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are central time, but only Manitoba does daylight savings. Since Alberta does daylight savings, there was no time change when we crossed the border at Lloydminster. 

Anyway, mountain time it was and we quickly got into rolling country with more varied kinds of vegetation. Suddenly cattle and horses seem to be more prevalent and, while I was napping, Catharine said we passed through an area where there was evidence of oil wells. So, that ticked off most of the Alberta boxes. Edmonton went by in a flash. We didn't get any sense of the city passing through the usual industrial infrastructure and suburban commercial zones. 

Finally, around Hinton, the mountains came into view. As you can see from the photo, we had a beautiful day to make the drive into Jasper. We were both excited to reach the mountains and the views were breath-taking. While I was driving, Catharine clicked off a bunch of photos. Here are some of them. 

(find the face)

If you look closely at the last one, you will see people wading way out in the Athabaska River. There were many cars stopped here and it seemed to be the thing to do. We saw one group probably a good half a kilometre out. Soon after that, we came across a bunch of stopped cars and the usual photo flurry going on whenever wildlife is spotted. So we joined the scrum. It was a group of elk/wapiti feeding by the road. 

We got to our campsite in Wapiti campground and quickly set up (we're getting to be very good at this by now) and enjoyed some freeze-dried Pad Thai that we had saved for just such an occasion. After three long days of driving (and neglect of the time-consuming blogging, with apologies), we collapsed in bed, thankful to have two days of rest and leisurely sight-seeing ahead of us.