This story covers our customized week-long family road trip in Canada, revealing Southern Alberta’s hidden gems, highlights and expert-approved travel tips.
Finding fossils with our tongues. It’s one of those activities that surprises you when the guide says ‘it’s your turn’, and also one of those travel moments you end up sharing for the rest of your life (at least I have).
Whenever spring comes around, we start planning our summer and fall travel, which inevitably leads us back to the trips and destinations we can’t forget. Our road trip through Alberta with Canada By Design was one of those trips. From the city to the Badlands and Waterton Lakes National Park, our customized week-long Canadian Road Trip has become the marker to which all other road trips are measured.
As with most great trips, our southern Alberta drive was full of a lot of firsts, but, to be honest, firsts can be scary – especially for travel. On one hand, taking a trip to a new place is gambling with vacation days, and, on the other, a true first takes you completely out of your comfort zone. For us, this translated to our first big road trip as a family – the longest road trip we’d ever attempted, which included a bunch of sights and attractions that no one we knew had ever visited.
Recommended Sights:
- Calgary Tower
- Calgary’s Heritage Park (especially for families)
- Banff Gondola
- Banff Upper Hot Springs or Miette Hot Springs
- Johnston Canyon Waterfalls and Hike
- Royal Tyrell Museum
- Dinosaur Provincial Park
- Waterton National Park
- Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump
Of course, the biggest unknown was traveling with our toddler, Augustine. Although we’d done a few road trips with her before, every few months she seems to become a totally new person with all new powers. And, just as any superhero movie will tell you, sometimes powers fit right into the flow of life while others can wipe out half a town before being brought under control.
Day 1 – Day 3 Calgary to the Canadian Badlands
Setting out from Calgary I took it as a good omen that, a couple hours after landing, all three of us were enthralled watching a huge beaver working away on his bridge-side dam. The reason we had chosen the Southern Alberta trail was for these moments; to see things for the first time and connect with things we’d only seen in books.
Specifically, I’m talking about dinosaurs.
It’s been pointed out to me by others that I look for quintessential moments in life. As a Dad, I think this roughly translates into trying to give Augustine access to classically ‘kid’thingslike trucks, dolls, and dinosaurs. In my head, there’s a span of years in every kid’s life that is set aside to love dinosaurs (for me, I’ll never forget the two plastic dinosaurs that seemed to be always within arm’s length) and while I didn’t want to force this Jurassic love on Augustine, I did want to give her the opportunity. So, we headed out to the Canadian Badlands to discover dinosaurs.
**There are a few different museums mentioned throughout this post. Instead of gushing over each one, just understand that a Canadian Museum – any Canadian Museum – is something more magnificent than it needs to be. Whereas the rest of the world lets the more obscure museums subsist, Canada seems to take pride in making even the most remote a world-class experience.
Psst, before we continue – here’s how our Canada By Design Travel Designer organized each day of our Jurassic Adventure in Southern Alberta.
- Day 1 Calgary, explore the city (it’s so walkable!) and enjoy Prince’s Island Park
- Day 2 Drumheller, Royal Tyrell Museum, explore the hoodoos
- Day 3 Drumheller to Dinosaur Provincial Park (plan a whole day)
- Day 4 Drive to Elkwater
- Day 5 Waterton Lakes National Park
- Day 6 Drive back to Calgary (or plan another couple days up in Banff if you have time)
Days 3-6 Dinosaur Provincial Park, Elkwater and Waterton Lakes National Park
Augustine had never seen a dinosaur bigger than her hand until a T-Rex swung its life-sized head to look at her as we entered the Royal Tyrell Museum (I’m pretty sure Augustine thought we were in a zoo for the first few minutes). This turned into long walks through Drumheller where we’d stop to hug every one of the sidewalk dinosaurs, but it was also a great gateway into the following day at Dinosaur Provincial Park – where we dug up our own fossils and yes, had the opportunity to lick them. There are hundreds of thousands of both rocks and fossils in this area, and our guide told us the best way to differentiate the two is by licking them (fossils are porous, so unlike rocks your tongue will stick to them!).
Our guided tour through Dinosaur Provincial Park is one of the best travel experiences I’ve ever had. The park has so many fossils that every single tour unearths new bones. It’s also a place of total authenticity – where the history of fossil discovery stems and full skeletal fossils are presented still preserved in Earth.
Rarely do we travel to the same destination twice, but since discovering Dinosaur Provincial Park, Jade and I have begun keeping a list of places we want to return to when Augustine is older. Southern Alberta on the whole has stayed steadily on top of the list.
It was shortly after leaving the park that the benefits of all the preplanning and first-person-vetted advice really began to shine. Traveling the rest of the Badlands became a string of incredible stops that we only found because of the experts at Canada By Design. Thanks to them, we ended up in the self-proclaimed ‘Canadian Alps’ and perched up in one of North America’s few ‘Dark Skies’, watching Augustine get so dizzy from trying to look at the stars that she fell down twice. It was a truly spectacular sight that city dwellers don’t often see – millions of twinkling lights and shooting stars in an endless black, velvety night sky.
Next to knowing where to go, dining is one of the hardest aspects of visiting any place in the world. Sure, there are user reviews and/or nationally recognized award-winning restaurants, but sometimes it’s hard to know which of the places is worth visiting if you only have one meal. Following the suggestions from Canada by Design helped make the decision easier, and the multiple options listed gave us plenty of flexibility.
Our final stop was Waterton Lakes National Park, known for its chain of lakes, grazing bison and views of the Rocky Mountains. For most of my life I held to the belief that all of Canada was essentially just a sprawl of Banff, however I now know that our trip would have been incomplete without time spent in Southern Alberta.
MAP:
As we rounded the turn and saw the Prince of Whales Hotel perched above Waterton Lake, I was completely awe-struck. The small town delivers a more intimate experience than what can be found in the national park, and its location allows for easy access to so many gorgeous sites. I never would have detoured to Waterton without a nudge, and, more over, the feeling of wonder that surrounded us through the rest of the drive would have been completely different had it come after Waterton.
It was obvious that our Canada be Design Travel Designer knew exactly what she was doing. We were able to pull into our lakeside hotel, relax, and hike Bear’s Hump all in the same afternoon – and truly, there’s no better way to say ‘hi’ to Waterton. It’s rare to go on a trip and know while you’re still there that you’re lucky or that you’ll remember it for the rest of your life. It’s also hard to find a way to say that and not come off overblown or hyperbolic. Our drive through Southern Alberta was full of so many experiences that we as a family will never forget, and many of these stops were completely unknown to us prior to planning with Canada by Design. You can follow along with more of the day-by-day highlights of our trip through our daily recaps on the blog (link to the recap posts) or visit the Canada by Design websiteto customize your own version of this trip.
