Escape from the Cabin - An Alberta Staycation

 

As you may know if you’ve read my blog post “Escape to the Cabin” Rose and I are fortunate enough to have a place out in the country to escape the city during covid. Over the last two summers we have spent a lot of time exploring the little towns and attractions around the area near Bashaw Alberta. This post is about the roving we’ve done and some of the local gems we’ve discovered.

We love our little 10 acres of paradise but there’s only so much reading and relaxing and tinkering you can do so we’ve started to develop a routine. When we get out there on Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, we settle in and plan our “Escape FROM the Cabin” for Friday. Sometimes it’s just our local little town of Bashaw but usually it’s a little farther afield.
Bashaw is just a 10 minute drive and we’ve been there many, many times over the years and we try to shop there as much as possible to support the local businesses.

Bashaw Rodeo Chuckwagon Races

The Bashaw Museum

The Bashaw Canada Day Parade

It’s a little strange in a town of 830 people to have 2 liquor stores and 2 grocery stores and at least 4 restaurants but that’s what Bashaw boasts. There’s also a butcher shop, a hardware store, a building supply store, a drug store, a gas station and many other small businesses.

This is not the city though! You better watch the posted hours if you want the store to be open and even then, with one restaurant in particular, it’s still a crap shoot. I get it though, for a small family run business it’s important to draw a line and declare that family comes first. We love this one restaurant called “The Noble Fox” (weird name for a Mexican Restaurant) and we often take our visitors there for some great food (when it’s open).

Delicious burger at the Noble Fox

Steak Carnitas at the Noble Fox

On one memorable occasion Rose and I attended a dance at the Majestic Theatre in Bashaw and had a great time sitting and chatting with some locals between dances. Before covid came along we enjoyed the Bashaw Rodeo and chuck wagon races on one nice August afternoon and hopefully we’ll get another chance to do it again.

Bashaw Rodeo Mini Chuckwagon Races

Bashaw is so close though and we’re there so often that it’s not really a special outing for us anymore, more of a quick trip to the store for something we need. These days when we want to enjoy a special day in the country we are likely to venture into the bustling town of Lacombe. 

It’s a little weird to be saying this because I’m sure that Lacombe has lots more to offer, but for us the biggest draws are a thrift store and the best darn donuts I’ve ever eaten at a place called Toller’s Bistro. I may not know much, but I know a great donut when I bite into one and yowza, these donuts are da bomb!

The Worlds Best Donut!

Before I tried their donuts the best donut like thing that I ever tasted was probably the cronuts we tried in Montreal in 2017, but now there’s a new champ! Rose likes the lemon poppy seed donuts but I’m a chocolate man and their Skor flavoured donuts are my favourite for sure.

I’m kind of glad that for us the cabin is a three season affair and from November until April I can wean myself off of these amazing pastries of fluffy, sugary, bliss.

This past year as we contemplated closing up the cabin, we determined that it was absolutely necessary to make a last stop in Lacombe to pick up a dozen donuts to freeze and ration out over the long cold winter. Only this (or something tasty like it) makes it possible to survive an Alberta winter!

Of course there are a couple of other things that we love about Lacombe, they have a really big farmers market on Fridays with food trucks and baked goods and all sorts of yummies. Plus they have at least one really good restaurant called the Cilantro & Chive, yum!

We also love the thrift store because they have a lot of DVDs for sale and they only cost $.50 each! It feels like such a bargain (start the car!) toting 15 0r 20 DVDs back to the cabin along with a bunch of kids books for Junie and paying only $10 or so.

We both love a bargain and with no TV at the cabin we always need a fresh supply of viewing and reading material. We took some friends and our adult kids to Lacombe on a couple of occasions last summer and I don’t think they appreciated the thrift store as much as we did, although when we took them for donuts they sure perked up!

Not far from Lacombe is the Ellis Bird Farm and at least a couple of times a year we like to go there and wander around through the flower gardens, woods and trails watching the hundreds of birds that nest there. This past summer we took Junie and Kait for the first time and had lots of fun down at the pond trying to grab up some pond life in the nets they provided. Next year when she’s three, she’ll be able to do more activities and we can’t wait to take her back.

My Ellis Bird Farm Pond Photo-393,000 views on Google Maps!

Kait & Junie trying to catch a pollywog

In our travels we kept seeing a sign for the town of Stettler and since it was only about 40 minutes away from the cabin we figured we’d give it a try one Friday afternoon. Sorry Stettler, but we gave it a shot and your thrift store was closed “because of covid” and the only donut shop besides Tim Hortons that we could find totally sucked! I don’t doubt that there is more to recommend the town but for us it was a bust except for the cool old sign shown below.

Cool old sign in Stettler

On the other hand we loved the much smaller town of Alix where my grandparents had a house when I was growing up. It was fun to drive around the town and search for the old house and it was even more fun when we found it! I have many fond memories from my childhood of spending time there with my Dad’s mom & dad, Cecil & Lois Petry.
My grandfather Cecil worked at the local “creamery” in Alix until he retired and eventually passed away sometime around 1975.

The house had one of those attics with the little "secret passage" running beside the eaves and us kids loved to creep from one bedroom to the other, trying not to fall through the weird, vermiculite insulation. Such fun with the cousins munching grandma's home made cake donuts (I'm sensing a theme here) and playing in the attic bedrooms.

The town is unrecognizable now but lakes don’t move (much) and their house was adjacent to the North side of the Alix lake and that made it a lot easier to find. We discovered that today Alix has a great little antique store and lots of other shops and a few restaurants that we will have to try out the next time we are there.

Another fun little place that we like to go is “Gracie D’s” antiques and collectibles in the tiny little town of Mirror. This store almost seems to be bigger than the whole rest of the town combined! There are 15-20 small buildings in an enclosed yard and one main building and everything is just stuffed full of, well, stuff.

Much, much stuff. There’s Big stuff, small stuff, old stuff, very old stuff and shiny or rusty stuff. Lots of happy rummaging material here!

Gracie D's yard decorated with old truck & Flowers

Old Volkswagen Beetle at Gracie D's 

There’s one other town nearby that we often spend time in and that’s Camrose, a 30 minute drive from the cabin. We came so close to moving to Camrose a few years ago and Rose made me drive there to look at houses many, many times that summer. But along came our granddaughter Junie and that was, as they say, that.

The shopping and restaurants in Camrose are great and there isn’t much that you can’t get there, we love Mirror Lake and the path that goes all the way around it and we like to stop for an ice cream cone and then take a nice walk around the lake.

We’ve really missed the “Jaywalkers Jamboree” that takes place during June in Camrose. It’s basically a small town version of whatever they’re now calling Edmonton’s Klondike Days/Edmonton Exhibition/K Days, but with free parking and no entrance charge because it takes place right on the downtown streets.

Fun on the Carousel - Jaywalkers Jamboree

Games & Prizes

We find that there is always something to see in Alberta’s small towns and we really enjoy wandering around checking them out when we’re a little bored and trying to “Escape from the Cabin”. Christmas is now over and the days are starting to get longer, oh so slowly, so it won’t be long until we’re again anxiously anticipating spring once again. We just have to get through January and February and March, nothing to it!