On Saturday afternoon, we departed Calgary's airport to find that Thrifty Car Rental did not have the car Tom had ordered. So they gave us a bigger car, something called a Chrysler 300 (with sunroof). We piled in and headed out on the straightest roads I think I've ever seen, down the Trans-Canada Highway number 1 towards Brooks (with a lunch stop at Smitty's, a very popular Canadian chain).

There isn't much to do in Brooks, so after riding around, we drove the 20 minutes to get a peek at Dinosaur National Park. One approaches from a bluff with tremendous overlooks, so you can see how deep and sprawling is the gorge carved by the Red Deer River.

We visited the small museum at the information center (with very helpful staff), and grabbed maps for the various hikes we would take on Sunday. We drove the circle route around the park, looking at "hoodoos" (erosive columnar rock formations), and then headed back to Brooks to check in to our hotel, Best Western. They of course were booked and had no record of my reservation, and didn't seem to care (I've left them very negative feedback with the Best Western international headquarters). So we went across the street to the Heritage Inn, again with nice staff, and checked in there.

We had Guinness Stout at a nearby Irish pub (which did NOT have friendly staff), then had dinner at the Chinese Buffet restaurant across the street; the food was delicious, cooked nicely with crisp vegetables. (This was to inspire Tom's eating craves for the rest of the trip!)

On Sunday morning, we drove back to the park, and started the 3 hiking tours. Each hike featured a different aspect of the park: the Badlands hike, the dinosaur hike, and the river hike.

There were incredible rock formations everywhere we went, and the hikes were not very strenuous (except for the bugs by the river).

The park is still an active area of excavation (conducted through the Royal Tyrrell museum). We didn't find any dinosaur fossils (except for the ones on display under glass in the park), bud did come across some amazing hoodoos.

Then we hopped back into our silver car and headed north toward Drumheller, where we would spend two nights and see more dinosaurs. But before we found Drumheller, we came across the fascinating little hamlet of East Coulee.