Edmonton and starting across the Canadian Prairies

Helga in her beautiful kitchen

Spring green abounds!

We arrived in Edmonton on Sunday afternoon, after leaving beautiful Jasper and the mountains in our rear view mirror. We stayed with our cousin Helga Lambert, who had invited other cousins and assorted children and grandchildren for Sunday dinner in their lovely home (her husband David, Bill's cousin, was in the hospital unexpectedly, so we visited him on Monday).
After visiting another cousin late Monday afternoon, we headed south for the first time this trip, and Tuesday morning headed east toward the Alberta/Saskatchewan border and the little farming town of Maple Creek, where we are camped tonight. We spent the afternoon with a family that we are both related to through the Barber family, and had a lively discussion looking at genealogy records of our mutual great grandmother Louisa Lock Hughes (who I hope to include in my book of our amazing women ancestors).

No more mountains...just fairly flat, straight roads through farmland.

(Note to family members: this was Dorothy Barber Drever, her husband Bruce and their two daughters who are REALLY into genealogy!).
So far, we have covered over 2,500 miles, about a quarter of the distance we'll drive overall (gulp). Tomorrow we head into Regina, and hope to have a look around the Qu'Appelle Valley where Bill's ancestors settled when they moved west from Ontario and where Bill's mother was born.  Sorry prairie people but the outlook is a whole lot of the same compared to what we enjoyed the previous 2000 miles. However we did see an antelope grazing by the road.