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iStock, Mike Grandmaison, Felix Choo/Alamy, Calgary Zoo SPRING 2018 BCA A .COM 15 By the time we pull into Dinosaur Provincial Park, northeast of Brooks, the shadows are lengthening and the red sun casts the sandstone rock formations in a glowing bronze. We've left the flat prairie behind and it feels like the earth has swallowed us up into a Martian landscape of layered buttes striped vertically by water erosion. We stay right in the park in a canvas-walled comfort "cabin," which is like a fancy safari tent, complete with cozy beds and kitchen supplies. The kids love their rustic "hotel" and wake up refreshed for a trek in the park. (bottom, left to right) Water plunges over 12-metre-high cliffs at Lundbreck Falls; an abandoned grain elevator points the way to the ghost town of Dorothy, Alberta; (clockwise from centre) kids get up close to an otter at the Calgary Zoo; a model Starship Enterprise greets visitors to Vulcan, Alberta; a desert-like landscape (complete with flowering cacti; inset) beckons at Dinosaur Provincial Park; the world's largest dinosaur, a 26.3-metre-tall T.rex replica, towers over the town of Drumheller, Alberta. MEMBERS SAVE Did you know that when you travel to another province, medical expenses like ambulance rides, certain prescription drugs and emergency transport back home may not be covered? With BCAA's "Travel Within Canada" Insurance, you can travel out of province knowing these costs are covered. Members save -€‚ and Kids Go Free. bcaa.com/insurance Dinosaur Provincial Park to Drumheller A day later we hit the road for Drumheller. We pass the ghost town of Dorothy, an abandoned pioneer community that never grew larger than 100 residents. "There are ghosts there?" Bennett asks, peering out at its derelict buildings, which include a church, grain elevator and community hall. There may be ghosts haunting our next stop, the Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site in East Coulee, where Canada's last wooden tipple (used for loading coal onto railway cars) stands as a testament to the natural resource that fuelled the West's development. At one time there were 139 coal mines in the Red Deer River Valley. When our site guide starts talking about the region's colourful past – including some of the famous madams – I glance nervously at Blake. But the kids aren't listening. They're more interested in riding a bumpy coal cart and looking for barn owls in the old buildings. From there, it's a short and scenic drive into Drumheller. We have a Jurassic Park moment outside the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, where a lifelike velociraptor model greets us, and we can hardly wait to get inside Dinosaur Hall to ogle more than 40 articulated, mounted skeletons, from the docile triceratops to the armoured stegosaurus. But the day's highlight happens outside the museum in neighbouring Midland Provincial Park, when Blake, a geologist by profession, leads us off the main interpretive trail and into a maze of Dr. Seuss-like rocks and dry rills (carved channels), where the forces of erosion reveal new fossil specimens every year. Our trail-blazing is rewarded when I spy a mound

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