... and sometimes being wrong can turn out to be incredibly right! Passing through Radium Hot Springs yesterday on our way home from a Waymarking jaunt to Edmonton, the capital city of Alberta, we stopped in to get photos of a church. Turning off Highway 95 at Saint Joseph Street, we fully expected to see the church in question, but instead were greeted with an entirely different vision - a huge double decker English Bus and
A RED TELEPHONE BOX!!!. We had turned a block too soon, much to our advantage, as it turned out.
We had been chasing Red Telephone Boxes since we began Waymarking years ago. Each and every one we tracked down turned out to have been already Waymarked by another Waymarker, much to our chagrin. After having gotten over our original spate of excitement on finding the phone box we realized that this was
Radium Hot Springs, a very well known and very much visited tourist town, through which a great many Waymarkers had doubtless already passed. At least one of them must have gone down the same street and spotted the same phone box!! We figured we'd take pix anyway and, at the very least, we'd get to visit yet one more RED TELEPHONE BOX.
Upon arriving home we searched Radium for Red Telephone Boxes. LOW and BEHOLD,
NOTHING! So, here is our Red Telephone Box, undoubtedly the one and only which we are likely to find in our travels!!!
The Red Telephone Box in question stands to the east of the
Picadilly Motel in Radium, a couple of short blocks off Highway 95 on the south side of Saint Joseph Street. Twenty three years ago the motel (which receives more than its share of rave reviews, BTW) obtained possession of the phone box, which was originally placed in Lancashire, the United Kingdom. For most of those 23 years the phone box has stood outside their UK styled motel in one location or another to attract potential guests to their motel. In more recent years the phone box was joined at the motel by the red double decker bus to create even more visual appeal. The bus is not from London, as many would guess, but from the hometown of the Beatles, Liverpool!