Last week, during my abbreviated vacation, we managed to make it down to the badlands. We arrived on Wednesday afternoon and set up the trailer on the RV pad at our building in East Coulee. The next morning the girls took the truck and went out for the day, while I stayed behind and did some maintenance work on the building.
The "skylight" on the original section of the shop wasn't much of a skylight. It consisted of a couple sheets of corrugated fiberglass screwed down over a hole in the roof. I'm told this was quite a bit better than the original one, which consisted of a panel of plexiglas from an old grocery store sign. With the help of a couple of the employees from Dinosaur Valley Studios we removed the old fiberglass material and constructed a proper insulated roof curb. This consisted of a wood box, approx. a foot high, insulated with rigid insulation, and sealed to the adjacent metal roof panels with adhesive membrane. The old fiberglass panel was temporarily put back into place over this new curb. In a couple of weeks I will return with some sheet metal flashings to properly clad the exterior of the curb, and with a new triple glazed dome skylight. This will be a fairly large unit at nearly 6 feet by 8 feet. The added insulation and proper construction will eliminate the ongoing leakage issues and provide a considerably higher insulation value. While all of this was going on the girls hit a bunch of antique stores, some gift shops, and had lunch at the Last Chance Saloon in Wayne.
On Friday August 28th I helped out at the shop, setting up for the painting of a dinosaur exhibit that we were working on. By afternoon the girls and I set out to spend some family time together. We headed over to a local amusement park. While I was there with the girls, Margarit went and checked out another antique store. This particular amusement park in Drumheller had Bumper Boats and Mini Golf. While the two older girls had a blast on the Bumper Boats, Helena and I played a round of Mini Golf. After that it was Ice Cream for everyone, and then we met up again with Margarit.
Later, we headed down the valley to Rosedale, and went for a walk across the old Suspension Bridge. The girls had a blast climbing around in the hills. Once we finished up here we headed back to the trailer in East Coulee and had a barbecue. This included some steaks and some fresh corn on the cob that we had purchased earlier from the Hutterites.
The entire province was really enveloped in smoke for most of the past week. We noticed it back home in Edmonton before we left but down here in the Red Deer Valley it was particularly bad. It came from a big forest fire burning down in north central Washington State. The jet stream was carrying the plume of smoke north into western Canada. I attempted to take some photographs of the full moon, made very reddish by the smoke, but met with limited success.
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