Stopping for gophers on the road to Edmonton

Canada Day is a public holiday Monday in early July. It also coincided with the Shakespeare Festival in Edmonton. At home in Calgary, I had my hand-tooled Alberta Boot Company cowboy boots and straw hat ready with my Sheriff's badge for the upcoming Stampede. I wanted to go uber-English with Shakespeare before launching myself into the Wild West for 10 days.

Edmonton is the provincial capital of Alberta. It is also a big university town. My friend Fran did a university exchange there from Canberra several years ago and had a terrific time (including meeting her now-husband Chris, a friendly Canadian and a good touch-footy player to boot).

Laura and I drove up on a Saturday morning and stopped in the village of Torrington, one of the most unusual places I have ever been. Torrington is home to the world famous gopher museum. Gophers are small animals who breed like rabbits, dig up holes in pastures, create havoc for farmers and cause broken legs in animals who tread into their holes. When given a government grant for putting together a town attraction for tourism they decided no one would stop in a little village for an ordinary museum. They set the local boys the task of trapping and killing a lot of gophers, and after they were preserved and stuffed, they were then arranged into the dioramas pictured in the web album attached.

They were hilarious. The townpeople have had the last laugh and it has brought a huge amount of tourism to the town. The museum even has it's own song (I settled for buying a fridge magnet and a bookmark). Also about the town, every fire hydrant had been repainted into a cartoon gopher. Fantastic stuff.

Onwards to Edmonton, we checked into our digs, only a few blocks from Whyte Ave, the cool and artsy street of Edmonton, with pubs, cafes, boutiques and nightspots. We had lunch on Whyte Ave and then it was off to the Provincial Legislature buildings to check out our adopted Provincial Capital.

I seem to have made a habit of taking the "political/legal" tour of wherever I land. I have now visited provincial legislatures in British Columbia (Victoria), Quebec (Quebec city- only saw the outside, which I regret now), Manitoba (Winnipeg), Saskatchewan (Regina) and Alberta (Edmonton). I also spent half a day at the National Parliament in Ottawa and went to "Question Time" in English and French. It's more than I have seen in my own country.

The Edmonton Parliament was a standout. It was the third time I'd been to a parliament building on a Saturday afternoon and yet again, there were wedding parties having their photos taken in and outside the buildings. Given the beautiful Victorian or Georgian archiecture of most of these buildings and the lack of good weather in Canada, they make a much more romantic setting than the bride shivering with cold and the groom red-nosed and runny.

There was a cool fountain and pool outside the Edmonton parliament buildings and families in the summer take their children to play in the shallow pool and the gardens nearby, which I thought was great symbol of being in a free country. Flat petalled pink roses were the showpiece of the gardens and I am convinced that I had found the elusive "Wild Alberta Rose" that features on the Alberta licence plate with the slogan "Wild Rose Country".

With my well-travelled plush Moose hidden in my daypack, Laura and I joined a group of Asian tourists on the legislative building tour. The history of the building is fascinating, one of the first great buildings in the early electricity period. As a result, the building had thousands of lights and all the original wiring. The portraits of Queen Mary and (mad) King George were supposed to be hung over the grand staircase but when we arrived, Mary's portrait was the only one there. We supposed that George had taken himself off out of his painting to the pub, if not to be cleaned.

Our tour group was lead by a young Quebecqois lady, who had only a trace of a Quebecer accent. When the Asian tourists found out her background, they congratulated her on her English. To her credit, she accepted it gracefully.

The legislative floor was much the same as the others from around the country, but the Edmonton building had a curious quirk of archiecture that was unimagined even by the archietects.