Dad and Daughter Weekend

My eldest daughter Hailey [nearly 8 years old] and I spent this past weekend together.  We left Mom and two younger sisters at home while we went off exploring.  We didn't get a particularly early start on Saturday, and ended up running a bunch of errands before we eventually got out of the city.  But, we took the trailer along so that we could make a weekend of it.  We ended up travelling along Highway 45 to the east of Edmonton and explored some old towns.  We eventually found ourselves in Beauvallon, which we had explored briefly on a previous day trip last summer.  We set up camp on one of the side roads in town and proceeded to explore the townsite.  We found a number of interesting things.  An old stone building that was once an auto service shop.  And, a really cool old playground that fit right in to my "playground ghosts" photo series.  We lived on pizza and hot dogs and snacks while we spent our time poking around.  We met "Doug" an interesting gentleman who had moved there from the Okanagan with his family in the early 1990's.  Doug was a fellow artist who painted many of the things that were of interest to me photographically.  He was happy to let us wander about photographing some of the old junk on his property.  Doug told us about an old schoolhouse that had been moved to a site northwest of town and converted to a dance hall back in the 1940's.  Of course we had to check that out on our way back home.  We also made a brief stop at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, near Elk Island Park, on our way back home on Sunday evening.   We arrived late, so we were admitted to the Village free of charge, 45 minutes before closing.  It was interesting to see all of the costumed interpreters quitting for the day at 5:00PM.  I've included a number of images from our weekend together, including three in my "Playground Ghost" series that I shot on large format film with my 4x5 camera. These were taken with Polaroid 55 film, which I processed when we returned home on Sunday evening.  I also included a shot of the prairie sunflowers that are now in full bloom in our backyard in the city.