Between June 22 and July 7th I spent more than 44 hours in a vehicle driving from High Level, to Drift Pile, to Chateh to Boyer, to Edmonton, back to Boyer, to Edmonton again, and then back to Boyer once again. While it was a long two and a half weeks it was absolutely worth it.
Two other interns and myself met up to travel down to Drift Pile for the famous North Country Fair, also (appropriately) nicknamed "Hippy Days". We had a beautiful weekend full of music, dancing, sun bathing and friend making. I witnessed more dreadlocks, tie-dye and bear-footed people than I ever imagined possible, but with it came an overwhelming amount of love and acceptance from everyone present.
The following week I traveled to Edmonton for a week of training to be a facilitator at this years Eagle Wellness Youth Gathering. During the training I learnt a lot, and in the evenings it was nice to catch up with some of my Edmonton friends and attend the Edmonton Art and Design festival.
I then boomeranged back to the Boyer reserve to gather a group of 5 high school students and brought them down to Edmonton to show them the post-secondary options available to them. We toured the U of A Augustana campus, north campus, Grant MacEwan and Nait, and filled our evenings with walks down Whyte Ave, a visit to the Alberta Art Gallery, Shopping and a movie at West Edmonton Mall, gummy worm poker and a game of hide-and-seek in Lister Hall. At the end of each day we would compare on our phones how many steps we took and unsurprisingly we clocked nearly 40,000 steps each day. It is needless to say that we almost all slept the entire 8 hour drive home.
