Salt Spring Island

The Saturday after we returned from Alberta, 25th July, we went to Salt Spring Island with Myla and Rosanne, and there met up with Rosanne's old roommate Lynnea and her 2-year-old daughter Lysia. We hadn't even heard of Salt Spring Island until we were invited to go there!! It's one of the little islands nestled on the mainland side of Vancouver Island, and we reached it via a couple of ferry rides.

Views on/from the ferry...


Sights after disembarking the ferry...


Our destination was Salt Spring Island's Saturday Market in Ganges. The market has a rule that vendors must "make it, bake it, or grow it" themselves. The island is also very obviously home to many creative artsy types, and/or those who enjoy an alternative lifestyle, so it was some of the best people watching we have yet seen here - and that's saying something. It was a great day!!

Out and about at the markets...

Alberta road trip, Post 7: Around Red Deer

We spent the next few days relaxing and exploring Red Deer while hoping our car would be returned to us in a condition capable of making it the 1100km home. :)

On Saturday we went to the Red Deer Farmers Market, which totally impressed us since it was about 15 times the size of the one we frequent in Burnaby!



Then Linda gave us a tour that included a drive-by of the elementary school she teaches at - currently undergoing a 6 million dollar renovation - and some other sites of interest around Red Deer.



We also drove out to Sylvan Lake, where we had some delicious icecream from The Big Moo, and marvelled that the entire population of Alberta would attempt to fit along the one lakeshore whenever they have a rare beach-weather summer day...



Back at her house, we looked through Linda's photo albums from her year in Australia, and her book of memories of teaching my class - my Easter poem was on the first page!





That evening we went to a BBQ at the home of Linda's best friend, Wendy, and her family, whom we'd met on Thursday night when we popped in after leaving our car at the mechanic. At the BBQ were: us, Linda, Wendy, her husband Jeff, their younger son Riley (their older son had left on Friday for a tour of Europe with his marching band), Susan (Friday's tour guide and also Wendy's cousin), and Maxine (Susan's sister and the only one we hadn't already met).



At the BBQ we enjoyed a bison burger they made especially because Ben wanted to taste bison (it's just like beef, only drier) as well as lots of other yummies - thanks Wendy et al! Then we had a bit of a concert on the back deck, with Riley and I taking turns to play my guitar. When it started raining, we moved to the downstairs music room where we were able to add a drumkit to the mix. :) Overall, it was a wonderful evening and a highlight of our time in Red Deer. Thankyou to all involved for going to such effort and making us feel so welcome!







On Sunday, we were very fortunate to be able to spend the day at Didsbury convention, 45 minutes away, which we had not known would be on until Megan and Justin told us a few days earlier. Linda very kindly gave us a ride to convention. As well as Megan and Justin, Roscoe and Janessa were there too, so there were a few people we knew! It was a wonderful day.

That evening we caught a ride back to Red Deer with some folks that had been introduced to us for this purpose: Lori and her 16-year-old twins, Reid and Trent. Lori turned out to be the sister of the lady whose home we go to on Wednesday nights. :) Once back in Red Deer, they invited us to their house for a coffee, where we met the older son, Dane, his girlfriend Erica, and some other boys from convention who'd come for a visit. Around 10pm, Lori drove us back to Linda's house, but we ended up having such a great conversation that we sat in the car talking to her until after midnight!! And we have since seen them all again at our own convention here last weekend, where we also met Lori's husband Orlyn and their daughter Lana. What a delightfully random way of making new friends!!

On Monday, Ben ended up helping Linda buy a new computer and all the paraphernalia that goes with it, and while he was setting it up and showing her how it all worked, I made dinner. Our original plan had been to drive back to Salmon Arm on Sunday, stay overnight there, drive home on Monday, and be back at work on Tuesday. But on Monday afternoon we finally got our car back from the mechanic, only to learn that they had (1) not found the problem, and (2) not been able to get the car to act up despite driving it 60kms!!!

So on Tuesday we set off to drive the entire way home. We drove about 5 hours before the car started playing up again. Then, from 11am until nightfall, it was frequent cool-off stops (but do you think we could find any shade?!), many kilometres driven along the road shoulder at low speed, and one scary incident when we stalled in a uphill slow-lane with concrete barriers beside us and a large truck on our tail. Approaching Kamloops around 4:30pm, I phoned a mechanic there and made an appointment for the following morning, resigned to missing another day of work.



However, once we reached Kamloops, the car seemed to be doing a little better, so we decided to charge on homeward. But leaving Kamloops, just as the car was doing its lurching-along-losing-power routine, we saw a Ford dealership. We raced in and asked them whether someone was free to look at our car right then while it was actually playing up. During the day the problem had finally become bad enough to throw some error codes in the car's computer, and the "check engine" light had come on, so we hoped that would help identify the problem.

In 5 minutes, the Ford folks had hooked it up to their computer and were able to tell us that the problem was the fuel pump. We were advised that if we wanted to keep driving that evening, we should keep the fuel tank full and drive when the weather was cooler. This we did, and we made it home by 10pm that night, more than 15 hours after leaving Red Deer. I might add that the wonderful people at Dearborn Ford in Kamloops refused to charge us anything for their diagnosis and advice. That's customer service!!

The next morning, Ben took a half-day off work and traded our car in for a 2002 Nissan Sentra. The dealer can fix the old one for much less than it would have cost us, plus we wanted a car with air con after experiencing a 12-day driving holiday in >30 degree weather (and another summer here still ahead of us)!

...And that was our Alberta road trip. Hope you enjoyed coming along! :D

To view more of our Alberta road trip photos:
Click here to go to the album overview page.
Click here to start the slideshow where this blog post begins (Sat).

Alberta road trip, Post 6: The Badlands

On Friday, Linda and her friend Susan took us on a fantastic sightseeing road trip. In the morning, we drove 2.5 hours south-east of Red Deer, leaving behind the flat green farmland and entering Alberta's Badlands (cue spooky music). The topography of this area will be best revealed through our photos (further down in this post) rather than words. It's very stark, with visible layers of colour (tan, brown, maroon) in small round hills, few if any trees, and sparse and sturdy vegetation (spiky grass, cacti etc). I really loved it as it was so different and unexpected!

We came upon the Badlands suddenly, dropping from beautiful lush farmland down into a valley the Red Deer River flows through, and from the valley onwards the land was as described above. We crossed the river on a small ferry/barge - I still can't believe a man's entire job is to steer that ferry back and forth across a 30- or 40m-wide river all day long, for just a couple of cars each time! But I just read that the Bleriot Ferry has been in operation since 1913 and is one of the last sailing ferries still used in Canada, so I guess preserving the past is the reason for not simply building a bridge. :)



After crossing the river, we came across this tiny little roadside church that seats 6 people. It's not used regularly and is a bit battered by the elements (and tourists), but some other people who stopped there just after us said that they had friends who renewed their vows in it!



Our road trip destination was the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology at Drumheller. This is one of the world's leading palaeontological research centres, and due to being located in the part of Canada where more dinosaur species have been discovered than anywhere else in the world, it has a collection of over 120000 dinosaur fossils. Before checking out the museum, however, we did the museum's Badlands Interpretive Trail walk. These photos should give you a good idea of what Alberta's Badlands look like, as explaining its various features was the purpose of the trail...

This is the Royal Tyrrell Museum:

The view from the trail:

Us with Linda (left) and Susan:

And with Linda in front of some hoo doos (more to come on these):

After the walk, we ate a yummy picnic lunch (courtesy of Linda) before heading into the museum.



The Royal Tyrrell Museum was quite interesting and well worth a visit. We saw lots of fossils, read lots of information, and watched the museum's palaeontologists hard at work in their laboratory. My favourite exhibit was an enormous fossilised shell about a 1m wide and vibrantly colourful. The only [non-human] living creatures we saw in the museum were a glass tankful of Giant Tropical Cockroaches over 2 inches (5cm) long!! Oh, and a spider or two I think, but the cockroaches are what have stuck in my memory...







As we were leaving the museum, I bought a postcard that pictured a group of hoo doos, and as I was fascinated by them we asked the museum staff where we could find them. It turned out they were not far away, so we set off on a hoo doo hunt, and on the way we stopped in the town of Drumheller for some ice cream and a quick squiz at the "World's Largest Dinosaur" (Drumheller's claim to fame). You can climb up inside it to a viewing platform in its mouth, but we gave that a miss this time. :)



Then, on to the totally awesome hoo doos! Here's a quick explanation: "Hoo doos are eroded pillars of soft sandstone rock, topped with a resiliant cap. The cap protects the softer rock underneath from eroding as quickly as the surrounding rock". At the site there was a museum official keeping watch to make sure people behaved themselves - we could walk amongst the hoo doos but not climb on them, for obvious conservation reasons. Here they are - slews of hoo doos for you!











Other people were climbing all the way to the top of the hill in the background of the photo below. We weren't quite that energetic (it was a hot day!), but Linda and I left the two even less energetic ones at the bottom and walked part of the way up, until it started feeling slippery. :)





After we had sufficiently photographed and admired the hoo doos, it was time to start heading back to Red Deer. What a great day - thanks Linda and Susan!!

To view more of our Alberta road trip photos:
Click here to go to the album overview page.
Click here to start the slideshow where this blog post begins (Friday).

Alberta road trip, Post 5: Kananaskis to Red Deer

On Thursday, our only plan was to reach Red Deer by 5 or 6pm. There, we had arranged to stay 3 nights with my grade 1 teacher, Linda. She came to Australia on a 1-year teacher exchange in 1990, and has stayed in contact with my family and I ever since - including visiting us in Dalby when I was 13. So, this was to be a very exciting day, but I'll start at the beginning...

After moving out of our tipi, we drove into Kananaskis Village for breakfast. Check out the photo below of the "Warning: Bear in Area" signs we saw on the way! After this, we still had a few hours to fill in, so we stopped in at an activity ranch we came across, where they had a restaurant, shop, trail rides, teepee, busload of tourists, etc.





In the shop there, we found a book about hikes to do in the local area, so we decided to do a short one. This ended up to be quite an anti-climax, as the walk was about 50m and the beautiful pond we'd hoped to find looked more like an Aussie dam during a drought! But I did get to see some cute little red flowers up close, having zoomed past thousands of them since entering Alberta. (Anyone know what they are? I thought they were wild roses since Alberta is "Wild Rose Country", but just discovered they aren't.)





A little later, we stopped in at a university forestry research centre and did their Forest Ecology Loop walk. This was a very pleasant meander during which we didn't see a single other person. But we did see squirrels, chipmunks, and a variety of colourful flowers. We also tried to remember to make lots of noise (as advised) to warn bears of our approach!







In the afternoon, we stopped in Calgary to quench our thirst at A&W (a burger chain), where I had my very first A&W Root Beer Float, an essential Canadian experience. "Root beer" is the softdrink we call "sars" in Australia. So mine had a big chunk of vanilla ice cream in it. Very yummy! Our car had no air conditioning and the weather during this trip was around 30 degrees, so after this refreshing break we felt able to continue. :)



This is when the carefully laid plans of Byrds and men started to go astray. As we left Calgary for the final 1.5 hours to Red Deer, our [previously] trusty Focus started complaining mightily. In fact, it spluttered and conked, demanded that Ben push it to the edge of the highway, and then insisted that we sit there for a while so it could enjoy a little sulk. After a few minutes, we continued on our way. Then it happened again. And then again. No apparent overheating, still a quarter of a tank of fuel... we had no idea what the problem was.

To cut a long story short, we called Linda to warn her we might be late, and by the time we called her again in half an hour as agreed, with the good news that we were still making progress, she had called a friend of hers and they had already made towing arrangements and were about to come and get us!! But in the end we made it all the way to her house, although after 100 kms of driving fine, the car did stall twice more in the final 25 kms. That evening we dropped the car off at a mechanic in Red Deer and settled in for a few great days with Linda.

(Due to the car issues, our 3-night stay turned into a 5-night stay and we now have a new (to us) car, but more on that later!!)

Here's a photo of our first night in Red Deer: dinner at Earls Restaurant with Linda...



Next post: dinosaurs and hoo doos!

To view our Alberta road trip photo album in Picasa:
Click here to go to the album overview page.
Click here to start the slideshow where this blog post begins (Thursday).

Alberta road trip, Post 4: Icefields Parkway

We've just returned today from a wonderful 4 nights in Las Vegas, Nevada, but I have a lot more to get you up to date on before I can start telling you about it! We have also just signed up to pay Google a small annual fee to increase our photo/video storage limit for the blog, as we had reached 100%. Our new limit is 10 times as much as we have used in the last 2 years!!!

On Wednesday, we drove the 340 km from Jasper to Kananaskis... along the 230 km of the Icefields Parkway through Jasper National Park and Banff National Park, and on into Kananaskis Country south of the Rockies. This was an incredible drive with stunning scenery, frequent wildlife sightings, and the opportunity to see places I have been hearing about for years. I had heard about Banff and Lake Louise from my Canadian grade 1 teacher (who will shortly feature on this blog!), and Ben had done most of this drive when he lived in Canada 6 years ago.


The most exciting and memorable moment of the day was definitely our first ever wild bear sighting! As we were driving along a straight stretch of highway, speed limit 90 km/hr, we noticed a brown furry thing in the grass beside the road, just as we passed it. We quickly realised it was a bear, which then started crossing the road, and as Ben turned the car around and drove slowly back towards it, I thrust the camera out of the window and took the following shot:


I got a few other photos as well, but this was the best one as the bear quickly reached the edge of the road. We were very excited to see a bear AND be the first ones on the scene! (The oncoming car in the photo had cameras poking out its windows by the time it got level with us.) Getting this photo actually turned out to be quite a saga, as that evening when I transferred my photos onto my laptop, I discovered that 60 photos from Wednesday morning had disappeared off my camera for an unknown reason. Over the next two days, Ben downloaded and ran photo recovery programs from the Internet until he was eventually able to recover this precious photo and the others as well. Thank goodness for a geeky husband!!! :D

We also saw two more bears - black ones - later on in the day, but these we found because both times we came across a crowd of cars and camera-wielding tourists lining the sides of the road. Yes, this is exactly what all the brochures say NOT to do. But we figured that with only one bear and so many people, chances are we could outrun at least one of the others should it come to that... ;) Kidding!! The bears were both a way back in the trees and seemed completely oblivious to their audience. But our first bear sighting was by far the highlight.


Around the middle of the Icefields Parkway, where Jasper National Park connects up with Banff National Park, is the Columbia Icefield. The icefield has eight glaciers, and the Athabasca Glacier is the one in the photo below (it's the sweep of ice down the middle), as seen from the highway. In summer, tourists can take a tour over it in a "snow coach", a funny-looking raised bus with huge tyres. Ben actually did the tour 6 years ago, but we didn't do it on this trip - just took a couple of photos and drove on. It's a pretty impressive chunk of ice though, even though it's receding! Look for the people and cars at the bottom of the photo below for a sense of scale.


Our main non-driving activity of the day was a short hike up to Bow Summit to see down over Lake Peyto, which Megan and Justin had just done and recommended to us. What a view!!!


We also stopped briefly at Lake Louise, which was quite crowded and we didn't stay long. It was very pretty though! Near the lake we saw a number of relatively tame squirrels and chipmunks, and this was another highlight of the day for me! I had never seen a chipmunk before and I have decided that I love them even more than I love squirrels (which is really saying something). They are only about half the size of a squirrel, with stripes along their bodies, and they are so soooooo adorable!!!!! My photo of a chipmunk is not that great, so if you are keen on sweet tiny creatures, click here to see a really cute photo courtesy of Wikipedia. :)


After lunch at a Mexican cantina in Banff, we reached Kananaskis Country mid-afternoon. We stopped for a while at a pretty lake, and in the late afternoon we checked in to our accommodation for the night, which was... a teepee!!! Yes, we stayed in a large (4-person) "tipi" at Sundance Lodges and Campground near Kananaskis Village - they also have trappers' tents and 2-person tipis, but didn't have the latter available when I booked.


Staying in a tipi was quite fun! It had wooden floorboards, four beds with plastic-coated mattresses (we had our sleeping bags and pillows), a gas lamp, and a kerosene heater. Our tipi was in its own little clearing, a short distance from the neighbouring campsites and surrounded by trees. We were given precise instructions on the precautions to take to ensure bears would not come knocking (i.e. lock food and toiletries in car, NOT in tent - in fact, there was no way to lock or even secure the tent flap!). That night we went to sleep unusually early, slept very soundly, and were not troubled by any bears. :)

CLICK HERE to view our Alberta road trip photos.