Saturday Mark and I drove to Lethbridge for a book reading at the Galt Museum. It was, for both of us, the windiest drive we’ve ever had. Someone at the Museum said, “Oh, this is pretty normal.” I’m hoping that’s not true. We were almost blown off a street corner later in the day.
The drive was beautiful – golden stubble in the fields, cerulean blue sky with indigo smudges. We passed a wind turbine farm (for those who don’t know, that’s where they grow wind turbines). The mountains were mostly obscured by low clouds to the west, but we saw lots of the foothills and the prairies. As we neared Lethbridge we passed rugged river valleys that reminded me of the badlands around Drumheller, except not as extreme.
We drove around the University of Lethbridge, with buildings set into the steep bank of a river valley.
The Galt Museum is across the valley, an old brick building that used to be a hospital, with a gorgeous modern glass structure overlooking the river valley. I read to a great bunch of kids, many of them too young for Feather Brain, but they sat still and listened and seemed to really enjoy it. We played “What If” and invented a shadow monster and an evil alien robot; afterwards the kids made up their own stories.
Following great advice from the women at the gift shop, we drove into downtown Lethbridge, with it’s old brick buildings, wide main street and small-prairie-town angle parking, and had a fabulous lunch at a coffee shop.
On the way home, I found Carmina Burana on Mark’s IPod and cranked it up just as we drove through Claresholm. Claresholm is definitely not a Carmina Burana kind of town – KD Lang would have been more appropriate. As we drove back to Calgary the sky turned periwinkle and then a deep teal blue.
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