Day 87 - The Zoo and Western Development Museum

Up again this morning for breakfast with Holly and her folks at Tomas Cook. After yesterdays 'learning curve' with the huge pancakes and strawberries, thought I would go with the Egg Muffin. Maybe it is a sad state of affairs, but so hard not to put a 'Mc' infront of 'Muffin'.

First up we headed to the Saskatoon Zoo. It was a smallish zoo and I've probably been spoilt with the Dubbo Zoo where I use to live in Australia. In the Dubbo Zoo the animals are not in cages but have large areas to roam over.

Here is a wolf and much like most other animals in zoos, just sleeping the day away. As I discovered with the Dubbo Zoo, best time to go is around sunrise or late in the afternoon. The thing that surprised me about the wolves was just how big they are! They were significantly larger than German Shephards and the like.



Next up was the History of Western Development Museum - this was almost source material heaven! How I wish we had something like this in Sydney. They had an old main street from about the early 1900s with all kinds of buildings - banks, tailors, pharmacys etc and each were fully decked out with antiques and so forth. Here is the main street and each building you could walk into.



One thing I lament about our disposable consumer society today is the attention to detail and craftsmanship. Not only were things built to last in days gone by, but they had character and elegance. Take this stove for example, the detail and quality was just exquisite.



Some things also never change. This was taken inside the Women's Auxiliary and note the shoe's on sale/display - I may never understand the fascination with shoes. When I was working security in a shopping centre, the place could be dead but guaranteed, the shoe shops were always doing a roaring trade (the place would then go buzzurk the second a 'sale' label went up on the window).



I thought this photo was more interesting for lighting reference purposes. It is inside the train station and the dude is meant to be working a morse code signal thingy (off which were several).



The museum also had an interesting collection of restored cars. I'm not much of a petrol/gas head and look at things like this more so in terms of design. There is just something about the curves on old cars.