Agoraphobia

I apologise in advance- for this is a long one!

I have spent the last 5 days in Medicine Hat, Alberta. It's not a place I would choose go as a tourist; however, it is an important centre for UAV research both for Canada and for the World, and it is also where the Hutchinson family chose to settle (see 'Hutch-Host'). Since I'm looking at UAVs as a potential career direction, and the Hutchinsons had offered to host me if I visited, it seemed a perfect opportunity to get away from the mountains for once (of all things, I miss a horizon...).

I caught the Greyhound bus early on Tuesday morning, and settled in with my book and my MP3s for the 2 1/2 hour journey to Calgary. The bus was being jostled around quite a lot- the driver warned of a lot of frost heave on the Trans-Canada Highway (which I would spend most of my journey on), but after passing Canmore and making our way out of the Rockies towards the Praire, this lessened. Of all things, passing the theme park 'Tractorland' stuck in my mind, and we soon arrived in Calgary.



Calgary

I was to spend 3 hours in Calgary before my transfer bus to Medicine Hat (which was bound for Toronto, 2 1/2 days away!), so wandered in to town for an explore, for some lunch and to look around. It was a pretty dull Tuesday, but since it was lunchtime there was a lot of people around and the vast majority were wearing black leather coats... If you have ever seen the Matrix, what I saw in Calgary was very reminiscent of the scene where Morpheus takes Neo into the 'training program' which Neo thinks is reality, and as he gets distracted by the Woman In The Red Dress, he turns to find an agent pointing a gun in his face... Anyway, I felt quite out of place wearing my Banff clothes, in a city full of black-clad robot-like people.



Robots outside the TD Centre

Someone I'd asked in the Greyhound terminal suggested that I go to the TD Centre, which is a large mall in the centre of the city, so I duly did and wandered around looking at shops which mostly stocked unsuitable gifts for my hosts (since I didn't want to get them sushi, a plasma TV or a set of golf clubs) before grabbing myself some pasta to go. I took the opportunity to go to a sports shop and pick up (buy) a Calgary Flames t-shirt, since Hutch mentioned that there was a game on that evening, the '7th game' in the series, playing against San Jose away. Armed with this knowledge, I went browsing and was almost immediately asked 'Where are the Flames playing tonight'? I gave the right answer and it seemed like I had been 'accepted' by the hockey-mad sub-culture of Calgary.

Before long I headed back to walk the 20 minutes to the Greyhound station, but chose a different road... one which had a train... and after hopping on the train I found my journey only took 10 minutes. Why hadn't I done that before? Oh yeah, it was thanks to The Matrix... After picking up my stuff from the locker I'd rented, my coach was called and I boarded.

The remarkable thing about the Greyhound is the accuracy with which they can predict what time it will leave and arrive. All of the scheduled stops were made within about 1 minute of the predicted time, which is especially amazing given the distances these coaches travel, the number of stops they make, and the different conditions they encounter on the way. So why do buses in England, which travel only in good weather and then only about 20 miles from base, get it wrong all the time?

Shortly after leaving Calgary, we entered a blizzard which seemed pretty permanent, and the bus picked up speed on the Trans-Canada Highway. It wasn't long before we were in the Prairie, and the long straight featureless road to Medicine Hat. I promptly got bored and fell asleep. An hour later, I woke up to find that the view had not changed, although the bus was slowing down to enter a small gas station in the middle of nowhere. 'The middle of nowhere' is normally a phrase used in England but is never true. At this gas station, Calgary was 2 hours in one direction, Medicine Hat was 2 hours in the other direction, and the 20-odd Square Hours surrounding the station had nothing, other than fences and the odd farm. No hills, no rivers (OK, maybe one), no towns (OK, maybe one), no people (OK, maybe one or two). Kind of depressing and scary (especially to be lost in). And it was still blowing a blizzard...



The route through Nothing

Anyway, I digress. I found the driver walking towards me, and he stopped at me and asked me to leave the bus. Not to kick me off in the 'middle of nowhere', though, but to give him a hand with the trailer that he had been tasked to pick up en-route. These trailers are the Greyhound Courier Express, and shuttle mail and passes across the country behind the coaches. This particular trailer had been dropped off by another coach after having a flat tire, and now it had been repaired it needed to continue on to Toronto. So the driver headed out to show me which part of the coach mated with which part of the trailer, and asked me to help him reverse to mate the two. It seemed simple enough, since I'd directed the Park Gliding Club's landrover onto the Park caravan enough times, but it turned out to be a lot more difficult here.

The distance between the coach's rear axle and it's towhitch is about 4 metres, which meant that any turning had a pronounced sideways shift at the rear. However, the distance between the rear axles and the front wheels was about 10 metres, meaning that any any adjustment had to be huge. Also, the bus has two rear axles meaning two of the wheels have to slide sideways to achieve a decent turn radius, and in the slush the front wheels would rather slide backwards than the rear wheels slide sideways. Finally, it's a very powerful automatic vehicle which seems pretty hard to move dead slow, and move inches at a time. And all of this was not helped by the trailer not having a jack-wheel (so it can't be shifted to line up), and of course the rear visibility from the driver's seat of the Greyhound was pretty terrible.

Anyway, after a few different strategies and some 'shimmying', the trailer and bus were mated and we continued on our way. An hour further down the road, the sun finally broke to illuminate the bare and snowy never-changing landscape, but I carried on reading my Stephen King book and listening to The Kooks' new album until we started getting close to Medicine Hat.



Med Hat (more on how I took this photo later...)

The City of Medicine Hat is a large one of about 60,000 residents, built around a large valley of the South Saskatchewan River. It's a lump of civilisation in the middle of the wilderness, which came about due to it's proximity to the Canadian Pacific Railway and the river. There's a large military training area to the North of the city, then not much else for another 3 hours until you cross the border of Saskatchewan and enter Swift Current. But the city, rich due to large quantities of gas, has character and seems like a pretty good place to live if you don't mind being so isolated. And at least there's a horizon that is not the least bit lumpy...

Medicine Hat was the dinner stop on this service to Toronto, and when we arrived Hutch was there to pick me up and bring me back to his place. The Hutchinson family live in a large 100-year-old house a few miles out of town, on an acreage with a barn and lots of land to play on. The house was particularly interesting, since about 14 years ago it had been picked up as a derelict house from the centre of town, taken beyond the airport to be renovated, then moved again (all via large trailer and strong truck) to it's present location. There aren't that many houses that old in the city...

When we arrived I was given a quick tour, but Kay had prepared a delicious meal of spag bol which was soon ready and even sooner eaten. Grace and Beth, the two girls, were taken into town for their Taekwondo while Hutch and I watched the hockey on TV. Unfortunately, The Flames lost and were relegated from the league and a chance at the Stanley Cup. Oh well. Time for bed.