driving on a flat

well i've touched down in canada safe and sound!

not that it wasn't a flight without its pains... mind numbing boredom.

watching the little pixel plane fly the world really makes me want to bite the person who coined the phrase it's a small world (and my bite is a LOT worse than my bark).

anyways arriving in calgary airport i wasn't going to be staying in cowtown long for now. i do plan on returning here (if even just to catch my flight back "home" to new zealand), but today i was going to get the point of this return back home...

drumheller.

of course that meant i had to get there first. to do that you have to drive for an hour and a half across the prairies. man it felt kinda weird after so long away.

cause i mean look at em. the prairies are pretty darned flat.

of course there is a good reason for this. for about one million years during the ice age this whole area was underneath a huge sheet of ice that was 2 kilometers thick. seriously picture that in this picture. it'd be nothing but ice (which isn't helped by my being at the bottom of the glacier). with this much frozen water on top of you, you'd be as flat as the prairies too! (good thing i DID take this picture well after the ice age!!!)

not that i'm complaining. their kind of pretty. it's just strange to be able to see land as far as the eye can see, kinda like the ocean. new zealand isn't a flat place at all. even its "boring" farmland is hilly.

_

as the drive went on it made me feel kind of happy. it was like a blanket of comfort. not as in lying down comfort. more like relaxed and confident in your surroundings comfort... i was feeling like i was back home.

of course the iconic red blub water tower alerted me to the fact i was pretty much back "home". as it is the marker of where the prairies give way to the drumheller valley. more to the point when it pops up on the horizon it also means that the highway is going to turn into the valley as well...

meaning i was in drumheller. a place i hadn't been to in 2 years...

i wondered how much people here had missed me? had anyone missed me? in fact would any of them remember who i was?!?

the answer had to be a of course they do, as someone had bought me the ticket here... but still i worried. especially given the last time i'd been back.

given that i didn't know who had brought me halfway across the world, that alone what they wanted me to do now that i was over here, i was going to have to figure out who'd gotten me the present.

the safest bet was to hit the place that it had all started... when i say all started i mean everything. the first 3 years of my life were there. my greatest failure and hardship occurred there. the beginning of my new life in new zealand started there...

the royal tyrrell museum.

now as the museum was on the other side of drum from where you enter it (at least coming from calgary) i was going to have to drive through my old hometown. man what a trip down memory lane that was going to be, but yet a few changes and surprises were in store for me too!

NEXT: The Dinosaur Capital of Canada