misswanderlust.ca

Nanton is famous for being a small prairie town with an inordinate number of antique shops, and home of the Bomber Command Museum of Canada. Our final stop in Nanton for the day was a shop and artist’s studio that lays claim to the “largest stained glass mosaic in town”. Although only minutes apart, Red Rock Canyon was certainly far busier than Blakiston Falls trail, popular with families and dog-friendly. From the golden wheatfields to the spectacular lake views, from the quirky small-town shops to the desolate wind farms, our road trip to windy Waterton was another successful summer jaunt.

Opening up to the idea of going out of town for a day trip or a short weekend trip was not something that happened quickly or an idea that I approached lightly. The view looked out smack dab into the middle of Lake Louise; that world-famous view in technicolour right in front of our eyes, from the comfort of our room. We returned to the Fairview two hours later for our dinner reservation and were seated at a table near the big picture window looking out over the spectacular view of Lake Louise. Whenever we came back inside that day, a staff member outside the doors asked to see a room card, ensuring that the only people entering the hotel were guests there.

I hadn’t brought my bathing suit with me that day as we were going to be in and out of the car all day, a choice I regretted as soon as I saw that transparent blue-green water again. Sadness approached as we drove away from Cosenza’s centro storico; I was enjoying so much spending time with my dad there, and spending more time in that part of town than I ever had before. It’s strange to move on from a place that feels so familiar, a place that you have visited enough times to know your way around, have favourite restaurants, but not know enough so that you want to go back again and again, to really get to know the heart and soul of it. Then, finally, I took my dad back to Piane Crati, the place of his birth, to see if we could find the house where he was born.

The day that I had been impatiently waiting for since my first trip to Italy in 2008 had finally arrived; I was taking my dad to Piane Crati, a small town in the hills of Calabria outside of the city of Cosenza. The conversation between my dad, Franco and Rita flowed freely over the next hour, my dad getting the sweet opportunity to communicate in his first language, the Cosentino dialect, with someone outside of my immediate family, in the country where he was born. La Sila National Park is the lush, green centre of Calabria, full of sparkling blue lakes, dense forests atop and around mountain ranges, and abundant wildlife. The subject of La Sila came up when we were talking to Franco the previous day, and he told us about Camigliatello, a mountain resort town in the park.