It's Labour Day long weekend which means Neil and Cassie went off a 'road trippin'

Before we start the ins and outs, I'm going to find out what the hell Labour Day is and why it's celebrated in Canada, back in a mo............

............... so here goes, straight off the Wiki page

Labour Day or Labor Day is an annual holiday celebrated all over the world that resulted from the labour union movement, to celebrate the economic and social achievements of workers. The majority of countries celebrate Labour Day on May 1, and it is popularly known as May Day and International Workers' Day, while some celebrate on the first Monday of September.

The celebration of Labour Day has its origins in the Eight-hour day movement, which advocated eight hours for work, eight hours for recreation, and eight hours for rest.

So now we know what it is, lets get on.

I was looking in one of my faithful books of trips and decided we should go to Athabasca.

Atherbasca is about 145km's North of Edmonton.  To be honest, it's a bit of a grim place, most of the shops seemed to have closed down and nothing much was going on.  It was a real shame as the town seemed to be very proud of its past.  Everywhere you looked there were signs telling you the history of the place.

Until 1913 it was known as Atherbasca Landing and played an important role in the fur trade.  The Atherbasca River was the main trade link and is one of the longest undammed rivers in North America (1,231 Km's)

From there we decided to head to the town of Slave Lake, there is a big lake there called Lesser Slave Lake.

Lesser Slave Lake is the second largest lake that is entirely within the Albertain boundaries.  it covers 1160 kms over 100kms long and 15kms wide.

We stopped over in Slave Lake having packed an over night bag just in case.  Slave Lake town is a bit of a strange place, quite depressing all the paces we could find to eat were pizza places, A&W or McDonalds.It was a very industrail looking town with nothing much to do.

I had to take a picture of the liquor stores as they were next door to each other, talk about competition.

We headed off towards the Lake this morning after we had our breakfast  I wanted to go to the Boreal Bird Centre which is involved in Bird Conservation. 

A loop walk just by the centre.

We were told to go drive to the Lake where they were tagging birds but it was just typical that it had to rain.  I've just noticed that I don't have one single picture of the damn Lake!

We decided to stay in the car because like a pair of idiots we didn't take any coats.

We drove out of Slave Lave and headed towards Swan Hills, then onto Fort Assiniboine.  I really needed the toilet so we drove into the small town.

A very big wagon wheel and pickaxe, just don't ask

We stopped at the museum and had a nice chat with one of the locals then headed back to Edmonton via Barrhead.

We probally won't go back that way again only to go the opposite way through Atherbasca and head to Fort McMurray.  Not sure when we'll head that way but I would like to get there before the white stuff comes along.

As i've been typing this blog entry the winds have really picked up, so I turned on "the weather network" and it seems they are saying winds of 90km's an hour.  The big red bar is stating warnings for the City of Edmonton for severe thunderstorms and a reminder that with severe thunderstorms there are chances of  tornados.  ekkk.

I'm going to grab a glass of wine to chill my nerves, see you.