It's already getting late into the summer and our travels haven't even begun. With summer sports and the rain there hasn't been much opportunity to head out. I was really hoping to hit some more roadside attractions, but even more then that, I was hoping to search for ghosts.
Armed with the books Ghost Stories of Alberta and Albert Campfire Stories (or something like that), I was ready to start my list. The problem there is that searching for ghosts turned into searching for ghost towns of Alberta. This proved to prevent a problem. How does one find towns that no longer exist? Apparently not on a map. After trying to find the town names on top of my Alberta map proved to be a very discouraging task. I kept wondering what I was doing wrong, until I realized it wasn't me at all. They are ghost towns - towns that are no longer around - no longer around to be placed on a map.
This is were Google comes in handy. Now I have my list and a number of coordinates, and a family who are less then thrilled to be spending another summer in the van with mom. I keep telling myself that they will appreciate it later in life.
Now I have 163 possible destinations, excluding the roadside attractions I'd still like to get in, with maybe 50% of them actually appearing on my Alberta map. I think I'm lucky enough that about 35% more exist in the world of coordinates, but the rest - who knows - maybe the ghosts will guide me.
