bring Canada’s history to life with fascinating replicas including the 1920s home of Nellie McClung, a suffragette and one of the ‘famous five’ who fought for women’s rights in Canada. Elsewhere, there’s a section honouring the First Nations people, an amusement park with a Ferris wheel and a Gasoline Alley vintage car museum, with wagon rides and steam trains on hand to take visitors round it all. The park costs £16 for adults and £8 for children and is open May to early October; the Gasoline Alley Museum is open year-round. Fascinating in a different way
is the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, located in the Badlands about a 90-minute drive from the city. It’s home to the world’s biggest collection of fossils, all excavated from the surrounding valley, alongside huge, surprisingly intact, dinosaur skeletons and skulls – one is more than 70 million years old. Guided hikes in the area are
available, while families can try an excavation experience in a simulated, fossil-strewn quarry for £9 (entrance to the museum is from £11 for adults and £8 for children. Under sixes go free).
w FARM TO FORK What really struck me about Calgary, though, was its food scene. One evening we chowed
The museum is home to the world’s biggest collection of fossils, alongside ginormous dinosaur skeletons
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down on fall-apart-at-the-fork wagyu beef at Restaurant Rouge, once voted among the top 100 restaurants in the world. Another saw us stalk out the city’s culinary hotspots on a waist- widening tour, complete with stone-baked Napolitana pizza, hoi sin-smothered duck wings and decorate-your-own cupcakes (the full three-hour walking tour costs £70 for six courses with Alberta Food Tours). Elsewhere, we found bakeries housed in former factories and OEB, a funky breakfast joint with several hundred items on the menu – this isn’t the place to diet. Things stepped up a gear on
the gastronomy front as we made our way over to Edmonton, a three-hour drive away – most memorably at the Prairie Gardens and Adventure Farm, just outside the city. The family-run farm, which is home to a petting area, kids’ mazes, mini train and more, offers day tours as well as evening experiences. We opted for the latter and found ourselves indulging in the likes of tenderloin
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beef, quinoa, caramelised carrots and deliciously sweet, cinnamon-spiced pumpkin to a backdrop of fairy lights and live folk music during three hours I’ll never forget. The evening experience costs from £76 including dinner, wine, music and a tour of the farm. Back in Edmonton, the vibe is
fairly industrial. But the city still has its share of gems – not least North America’s largest shopping mall, complete with full-on amusement park, wave pool and multitude of restaurants. The standout here though
was Elk Island National Park, known for its bison and home to about 600 of the colossal creatures, several of which we glimpsed roaming the empty, snow-covered fields beneath towering pines. Visitors can tour the bison-handling facility to learn more about its various species – which were brought over from Montana in the early 1900s to help with repopulation, after hunting had made them near-extinct. Alternatively, they can take part
PICTURES: ROYAL TYRRELL MUSEUM; EDMONTON TOURISM
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