Life trumps art

‎Just getting ready to watch tonight's movie, twister, when the TV got interrupted with a tornado warning for the next county over. I like the advice that if you see the tornado and are on the road then hide in a ditch. I always thought that was called crashing...

Year 2 - done

‎2 years ago we were at Heathrow, last year in Manley‎. It's been a long year, moving on from Oz, New Zealand, getting set up in California and then across the southern US and up to Canada. We've ticked of a couple of bits off the bucket list: Rotarua, milford sound, death valley, hoover dam, grand canyon, mardi gras and key west.

We've also been in Canada for exactly 3 months, although it seems longer. We've been living at a much slower pace here, paused for a month at the start and another month now, and we didn't exactly rush across from ontario‎. There are not a great number of specific places we want to visit or things we want to do here, it's much more about chilling out and looking at the scenery. The forests and lakes of the canadian shield went on for a couple of thousand Kms, and the prairies are also pretty spacious, so not a great deal of change as we move around, and the climate has been fairly consistent and benign compared to the tropics in Oz, so it has all felt a bit samey so far. 

Still, beats working....

Smells like Oz

‎Forest fires burning near the BC/Alberta border a couple of hundred miles to our west have intensified in the recent hot weather and the wind is carrying the smoke and some ash to us here in Edmonton. Sky is hazy and you can really smell the smoke. Reminds me of the fires south of Sydney as we drove down there....although I can't tell the difference between pine and eucalyptus smoke...

Prairies to mountains and back

As Mark has already said, we spent six days in Bow Valley Provincial Park and had a lovely view of the mountains. A nice hike through the park took me to Middle Lake

past lots of wildflowers everywhere

And down to the Bow River

Canada Day (July 1^st) saw us spending the day in Banff and watching the parade and fireworks later that evening. Banff is such a beautiful town and we may spend a winter season there J

And of course I had to join in the celebrations as it would have been rude not to!

The Calgary Stampede claims to be the ‘Greatest Outdoor show on Earth’. On Friday (4^th July) we went to see the opening parade and watched over 140 floats/ horses/ marching bands and performers walk by which took over 2 hours. William Shatner (Star Trek’s original Captain Kirk) was the Grand Marshall this year, although at 83 years old, he was in a car rather than on a horse. There is a town called Vulcan which is about 160kms south of Calgary, and they were hoping he would pilot their float

At various points during the parade, the road sweepers came through to clean up the copious amounts of horse manure that was left in the middle of the road, ready to catch out the following marching bands! We liked the way the trucks had been decorated

Then onward to Stampede Park and the opening ceremony and rodeo. I did appreciate the standing ovation I got for my birthday and the singing of O Canada and the Star Spangled Banner, although I would have preferred Waltzing Mathilda although one mustn't be too picky when one is in a foreign country ;-) I did enjoy the bucking broncos and bull riding…

and all in all, thoroughly enjoyed my birthday.

On Saturday we decided to drive up to the Columbia Ice-fields, north of Banff. The scenery was stunning and we saw so many glaciers on the way:

We’ll do Jasper and the other end of the ice-field parkway on our way to Alaska next month. We stopped in at Lake Louise on the way home but there were so many coaches full of tourists that we decided to leave it until next year when we come back this way.

On Monday we were back at the Calgary Stampede, this time to check out the exhibits, watch the chuck-wagon races and the evening show. At the Adrenaline ranch, we saw dirt bikes, an ATV and a snow mobile doing somersaults in the air – brilliant!

The chuck wagon races were really fast and we watched 8 heats, the fastest of which compete on the last day for up to $1m.

The evening show wasn't really our thing (I guess we've been spoilt over the years) but the light show and fireworks were good.

Tuesday we went out to the Olympic Park where the 1988 winter Olympics were held.

We had great fun on the Luge – this was the course

The park is open in the winter, so maybe the bobsled might be on the cards next time!

Wednesday we started our journey north and are now on the outskirts of Edmonton for a month, waiting for the skies to get dark before we head to Alaska

And now we wait for autumn...

‎Moored up just west of Edmonton now for the next 4 weeks. The main reason is to wait for the nights to draw in before we go further north to the Yukon and alaska so that we maximise our chances of seeing the northern lights. 

We are technically at about the same latitude as London - 53n - but as the magnetic north pole is actually centred over northern canada we are closer to the aurora band, so it may be visible here if there is strong solar activity. When we do go further north from august 6th we will go through Whitehorse which is home to a prominent aurora observatory, but they don't reopen for the season until August 18th as the skies are too light. But as we have to come back via the same road - the alaska hig‎hway is the only main road there is - we will visit on our way down to vancouver probably toward the end of august.

Edmonton doesn't look to be the most interesting place to visit, but we managed to get a deal on a month's stay where as we couldn't even find a space for that long around calgary or the mountains‎ as it's peak vacation season, and it's the last large population centre we will be near until fairbanks and vancouver. So as usual we have some chores to do, and I need to get my tooth fixed from when I broke it a couple of weeks back. So looking at how to winterise the bus, and enquiring about snow tyres as there is no provincial sales tax in alberta...almost as bad as buying winter coats in florida. 

Cool runnings

‎At the calgary 88 winter olympic park where the ski jumps and bobsled are. You can do the bobsled in summer with a pro driver, and they have a zip line from the top of the 90m ski jump, but both are a bit steep ( price wise - excuse the pun) , so we settled for a couple of runs on the go cart luge track which was surprisingly good fun for a fiver a go. Been a long time since I has a go cart up on two wheels kissing the apex....

Obviously on the wrong drugs....

Ok, admittedly this is my first country bar, but I'm definitely missing something. Band just started their set with a johnnie cash cover and immediately a group of Japanese jumped up and started what I assume is line dancing but looked like the birdie song with diahorria and bad hallucinogenics , with a canadian couple waltzing/fox trotting around the outside. And now it's turned into karaoke. Beer just isn't cutting it....

Happy canada day

‎From Banff