our carriage awaits

We stayed at an unbelievable hostel, the rooms were old train cabooses and they had llamas!  The 'caboose' carriages were complete with kitchen, original seats and bunk beds.  The llamas were 'Massey and Ferguson'. They also had a native style sweat lodge that we didn't try and a canoe that you could take out for free on the river which had a beaver lodge.

In the caboose

the garden of the hostel

Massey or maybe Ferguson

un alarmed llamas

All aboard - the car we stayed in

Bailing out the canoe

The beaver lodge, minus beavers

A guy and his son were sharing their carriage with a  family who had gone to bed early so we let them hang out with us. They were from Calgary where the Stampede had just taken place so he was waxing lyrical about rodeos and running with bulls.  Most of you would have wet yourself if you had been there, he chewed our ears off until midnight, it turns out he started out designing planes, moved into heli-logging and then finished up working on tar sand extraction! he rounded off the evening blaming climate change on HAARP!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program

He also worked designing mechanisms for dispersing conifer seeds as they work so hard to control the habitat by preventing natural fires they have to spend a fortune harvesting cones by pole sawing branches from pine trees, collecting up the cones, shaking out the seeds and roasting them to simulate a fire which they need to start germination and then they zag zag over an open area in a helicopter to disperse the seeds.  A bag of dried seeds he said is worth $90000!  Must be a big bag.  All because they prevent natural fires.

After blueberry pancakes with our first Canadian maple syrup we took out the free canoe to go in search of the beaver lodge, unfortunately all the beavers were fast asleep inside so we didn't see any but safer then the pair of us out in a canoe at night.