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| Riverside Cedar Campground May 2019 |
Today we booked the final campground for the trip west to Alberta. Some provinces let you book so many days in advance of your arrival while others have an opening date when reservations for the whole summer can be made.
Last week we booked in Birds Hill Provincial Park near Winnipeg Manitoba. We waited over an hour to get into the reservation system. I must have hit refresh at the right time as I got in about 5 to 10 minutes before my sister. As luck would have it, we're arriving there on a weekend and this is a very popular park for people in Winnipeg. You can make up to three reservations so I tried to book my sister's site as well but you need all of their account information to do it. Luckily, the system gives you nearly an hour to finish your reservations so I grabbed two sites close to each other and held them in my cart until she got on, then I released one which she was able to grab. It did turn out that one of the sites I got was one we had looked at; both look pretty decent and are on the inside of the loop so not far from the toilets.
Today we booked at Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park. The system was already up but you couldn't book until 7 am Central Time. There we're arriving mid week so it wasn't as much of a hassle getting sites, we got our second choice of the pairs we had picked. We're only there two days before heading to Tillebrook Provincial Park outside Brooks, Alberta. Tillebrook is more of a pass through park being only 1 kilometer off of the Trans Canada Highway but it looks quite nice. Most of the sites are pull thru, great when you're just passing through. Tillebrook is only 6 kilometers from Brooks, Alberta and just over 50 kilometers from Dinosaur Provincial Park, our last camping stop before Airdrie where we have family. Stopping at Tillebrook will let us have a lazy morning, then we can head into Brooks to do some grocery shopping before heading to Dinosaur.
We'll be in Dinosaur for four nights. Our sister who lives in Airdrie and her brother in law are going to join us. We were lucky to get three sites together there as well. Again, we'll be arriving on a weekend so what we did was book for an extra day, that meant we could book a day earlier for our dates, and then we changed the reservation for the correct arrival date. Much better to pay the $10 change fee, than not have a site. Had we waited until the next day we might not have gotten sites at all, when I looked there were only three sites in the whole park for our dates. I mentioned to a friend that we would be there so she checked online and was able to get a site behind us for three nights.
We haven't yet decided how long we'll stay out west and what route we'll take back. Now that you don't need COVID testing to cross the border we might come back through the States. I guess we'll have to think about that soon. Kind of sad, that you just can't take off and go camping on a whim anymore. I guess we'd find places to stay even without reservations.
