Maple Leaf Mailbag rock'N roadshow

Drumheller. Well there’s a few ways I could start this segment. Both are bad. Let’s start with Exhibit A. Late yesterday. The team is constantly hungry, my cameraman needs 15,000 calories a day, he’s 5’4,” 140lb, the man’s got hollow legs. I wanted to get into town to take some shots, it’s almost 2:30 in the afternoon, but the boys want homemade chili.. I’m really ticked off, we’re really late starting, but it’s three against one. Exhibit B. Tom is silent, as I said we’re late, I’ve had a word, he’s not happy, and he’s not paying attention to the road. It’s a long story, suffice to say Tom actually said “good work” to the officer as he was passed the $120 speeding ticket … What?? … Why?? … Now we're even later. Leave Calgary. We finally make it to the dinosaur capital of Canada. Drumheller is truly strange. Everything in Drumheller is going backwards. The former city is now a town, the time is 12 million BC, the fossil landscape is covered in snow. Every street corner has a dinosaur. There are blue ones and red ones, small ones and big ones, funny ones and nasty ones, they’re all here. You can see the world's largest dinosaur here … 86ft tall, 145,000 lbs … a caveman’s nightmare … the T-Rex. For $3 bucks you can climb the giant T-Rex and admire the badlands from inside its gaping jaws. Probably see the Hoodoos too. We did. Had a fantastic tour of the Tyrell Paleontology Museum, we thank everyone there for an amazing visit. Great day, but after the bad start Tom, Blake and Marty remain Unforgiven. Head to Brooks.

The sky opens up and we roll down into the valley. Drumheller, it's a place. No, it's a destination. At the dinosaur museum, one peers into the past. I examine their bones. I study there habits. It's rare to be able to get so close to the beast without fear of being eaten by one. In the town, I notice the creatures are living amongst the citizens. One gets the feeling that this symbiotic relationship has come to signify the area's identity. It's later afternoon now; we ride out to the badlands in search of the hoodoos. The moon-like surface of the badlands transforms to surreal. Standing between the alien out-cropping we watch the ethereal sunset.

Drive over the rolling plains, and then the ground drops away into a deep valley. Drumheller, home of the dinosaurs! The town is filled with the giant critters. We head to the Royal Tyrell Museum, where our guide Dan gives us a condensed version of the history of life on this planet. The fossils are impressive, but It's hard to imagine these giant monsters actually roaming the planet. The museum staff are super friendly and take us back to the collections rooms to show us how the bones that make their way to the museum are categorized and stored. Very cool. Back in town, we eat at a Chinese restaurant before making our way out to the hoodoos to take some pictures in the fading light. Donning our straw cowboy hats from the lady's department at Mark's Work Warehouse, we enter the realm of the Unforgiven.

Drumheller's a special town in the Badlands. Everything is dinosaur related. Funny...Sleeping in Brooks. It smells the meat...