North to Alaska- day 2

We spent the morning in Calgary and went to church. After church, instead of driving the freeway back to the hotel we took local roads into the heart of the city. Calgary has over one million people and is the largest city in Alberta. The downtown has a river that wraps around it and has a natural parkway on one side and a more developed parkway with bridges and wide jogging trails on the other side. The downtown has a collection of bridges that connect various buildings so that in the winter people can walk blocks from building to building without going outside.

We checked out of our hotel and filled the car up with gas ($4.33 a gallon)  and headed north to Edmonton (population 900,000). We got there about 2 and then decided to have lunch at the West Edmonton Mall. I knew about this place because it was the largest mall in the world for years but now is the fourth largest in the world but still the largest in North America. They have an indoor beach and water slide area, a central area that has things like seal shows, indoor ice rink and lots of other things. It is amazing.

After lunch we continued on and it was not to long before we left the plains and were into solid evergreen forests. The forests would only get thicker and taller from here on out. A wide swath was cut out on each side of the road so that you could see if animals were going to cross the road before they actually did. We did see a coyote and some deer that day. We filled up in White Court ($4.43 a gallon) and then crossed over into British Columbia and on to Dawson Creek that night at sunset which was around 9:40.

 We thought we would save some money and picked a motel that looked cheaper to save some money. It was still a $100 for the night but it definitely was cheap in upkeep as the wall paper was peeling off the wall and a crack in the door added to the character. We traveled 568 miles this day.