My Copilot Is A Troll

 Our trip to see my nephew's play in Medicine Hat gave me an opportunity to show Rob my old "stomping grounds". The weather was unusually grey, damp and foggy. Medicine Hat is renowned for it's sunshine and blue skies, but we didn't see a speck of it!  As we cruised around the city; showing of my high school, my grandparent's house, my church (that looks like a castle) - we ended up by Medalta Potteries. It's now a museum, and we decided, on the spot, that it was the perfect indoor activity. Medicine Hat's abundance of clay made it an ideal location for pottery and brick factories. Older houses, commercial buildings and churches are all constructed from brick, rather than timber (which is not in abundance).Medalta Potteries has iconic beehive kilns that you can go inside, galleries of pottery and glass (from Altaglass), and an abundance of antique machinery. The layout of the facility is part museum, part historic site, part archeology dig and part wor...

Medicine Hat (or The Hat) has a beautiful downtown, filled with unique restaurants, shops and parks. In addition to pottery and glass, bricks were produced locally, which makes for some amazing turn of the century architecture. Rudyard Kipling visited in 1907. Upon learning about the huge natural gas deposits in the area, uttered his famous quote "This part of the country seems to have all Hell for a basement, and the only trap door appears to be in Medicine Hat." The city's original planners filled the Hat with parks and greenspaces. In more recent eras, the entire city has been connected through and elaborate trail system.  There are people who are part of your life that time does not affect. My oldest friend is one of those people. Marcella and I met when I was 12. Our lives were so intertwined as teenagers, that she was with me on most of our first adventures. We were in 4-H, youth group and high school together. Our parents became friends and we married b...