06 May - Metis Crossing and north of Edmonton

Mary Lou worked for a while at a McDonalds in Meadow Lake while I visited a laundromat and did a load of wash. While waiting for the wash to do its thing I walked around the town and entered a Co-op grocery store and purchased a few things. I asked the cashier if she was from the area and she said she was. She did graduate from Carpenter and then we both discovered we were in the same class though we didn't remember each other, though we did know people in common.

As we drove away from Meadow Lake we started listening to The Litigators by John Grisham. This is a semi-humorous lawyer-based novel so we laugh a lot. I love watching Mary Lou laugh. It's just good for our souls.

In planning for this trip we wanted to find ways to better understand the story of the first people of this land. So I learned of The Metis Crossing and we visited them. This is a fantastic facility with accommodations and capacity to hold conferences and host events. We learned after we got here that they do give tours but those have to be arranged in advance with the tour guides. The location is beautiful beside the North Saskatchewan River and takes up many acres of buildings and grassland. Though we didn't learn a lot that we didn't already know about the Metis people, we enjoyed our time there.

There was an event going on when we visited and we came across a Lego artisan who had collaborated with an Indigenous artist to create a rendition of her work using a whole range of colored Legos. The participants put together little square Lego cards with the color coded Legos, making up the final image. Metis artwork has a unique style of floral beadwork which is colourful and has a certain symmetry as well.

As we drove away we started getting alerts on our phones of a forest fire not far away. The alert included instructions for where people should evacuate to. We weren't so close to the dangerous area, but it was a serious reminder that forest fires are now part of western life, at least in some areas. It was sobering to realize the "season" had already started. We heard comments that it is really dry already in northern Alberta.

We found a fantastic iOverlander park for the night. It is a huge grassy, mostly level field with concrete picnic tables on one side, and, what some have identified as a Native American Midden in the center. Apparently this is a type of archaeological site consisting of a heap or mound of accumulated domestic waste, including shells, bones, utensils, and other artifacts, left by Native American populations over time. Ours had a steel rod protective barrier around it and the two-tiered mound was covered in grass. We spent a great night beside this pile -- Mary Lou even slept in to 6:45AM!! (Alberta time which would be 8:45 am Ontario time!)