Vegerville visit

The kids are off to school, the autumn routine is in full swing and the weather is reminding us that summer days are almost over. We even have had the furnace on a couple of nights! Change is in the air!

Wendy and I had talked about visiting a number of small towns in the area as part of our getting to know the area. This week we decided to visit Vegerville. An hour from Edmonton along the Trans Canada Highway it is an easy drive. There’s not much between Edmonton and Vegerville but the traffic headed east is busy.

This area of Alberta is at the heart of where Ukrainian settlers came to Canada beginning in 1891 and of course continues today! We discovered a lovely quilt shop in the downtown area. The gal who was working in the store was friendly and engaging. It has always been curious to me how many of these shops we visit, and we’ve been in dozens while having huge inventories, brightly displayed products, impressive offers of classes, and even tours. Yet their ability to be warm in welcoming customers or to engage in common discussion or offer help seems to be the weak point. It may be that this is just the spillover from a lack of customer service in retail generally but quilters are an interesting group. Like guys with a garage full of woodworking tools, or classic car collectors who hunt down the cars they love, quilters have lots of money invested in both machines and in fabric and they are very loyal to a good shop.

I won’t go into details here on this shop, but I was really taken by the gal working here and her openness to chat. While we were there the coach for the Vegerville Vipers came in!

What a fascinating discussion came from that. Ths is where he gets the name plates for the back of the hockey jerseys made. He had sent her some names and she had embroidered them up for him. It was interesting to discover they have orange, black, white and purple jerseys. His next four new players he told us are coming directly from Ukraine! Big guys who have a good history of hockey playing. I won’t mention here the names he talked about but I may be following the Vipers online.

In touring around town, we came across the old train station. I mentioned to Wendy I wanted to go back and take a couple of pictures. Now hang on – but here’s your chance to own a piece of history because the Vegerville train station is for sale!

Another place that caught my eye was The Garage. This is an indoor garage that specializes in restoration and sale of some great vehicles. Two are parked outside but inside are the real treasures – Model T, old Cadillacs, old trucks…

I was taken with the old gas pumps and remember pulling up to a pump where you had to turn the handle on the side to reset the gauges! Does anyone else remember that?

You can look up The Garage in Vegerville for a look at their cars for sale!

On the way home, we stopped at Elk Island National Park. This is just 50 km from our house so an easy to get to park – and it’s quite large with several lakes. The big draw for me, with my new camera – a Canon M50 (a mirrorless camera) was to see if I could get some good photos. I’ve still got to upload them to the computer to process, but here’s a sample of what we saw!