Bird's Hill Park and a Prairie Anomaly

At last, the previous owner of the house is starting to work on completing the siding of the house - something he was supposed to do prior to our move-in!  The plan is that he'll be over for the next few Sundays to work on it, which is such a relief.  No more paper on the side of the house that flaps in the wind, and a fence to keep people from cutting from the front of the house to the back alley.   It'll look and be so much better!

So knowing that nap time after church would be impossible, we loaded the kids up and headed 24 kilometres north of the city to Bird's Hill Park (hoping they might nap a bit in the van - ha!).

While not the treed forest trails of BC, we enjoyed doing a 2 km circuit with the kids.  I appreciated that unlike Northern BC, we didn't have to be wary of scary wild life, just watching out for the occassional deer droppings.  It was so nice to be out in the quiet - not a person around!

Where are those barrettes when you need them?

Since she can't haul around the big snow chunks of winter she settled for a rotten piece of tree.
Always the collector!

No wonder she was tuckered out!

With still more time to kill, we took a detour to nearby Cook's Creek - a rural community with seemingly not too much around, yet suddenly at the road side emerges an incredible Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church.  My camera decided to reject my memory card after four (not-at-all-good) photos, so I can't do remote justice to how surprising the church - a national historic site - is.

You really should check out a few of the slides from this photographer's blog to get a feel of it.  Painted by local amateur artists, it's a little cartoonish with pastel colours and many different painting techniques.  No insult intended, as all-round, it's impressive.  I haven't seen anything quite like it.  But it's rather like a huge movie prop on the outside, with painted black lines to make brick shapes, etc.  I can't imagine how hard it is to maintain such a building when the surrounding population can't be that large.

The real surprising part, however, is the attached Grotto where the church re-created the Twelve Stations of the Cross.   Apparently the grounds are open in July and August for tours, but the gates happened to be open and so we went in to explore.  We tried to keep the kids respectful, but it was rather hard to manage. Not just because my kids and respect aren't overly acquainted yet, though they did try.  But in their minds, this was the ultimate hide-and-go-seek grounds, with all its caves to dodge in and out of.   Needless to say, it was certainly worth the detour for all of us.

For scale, you can see Steve's little head up there to the right