Travels...

Well - time flies when you are travelling - and it seems that I haven't written for a week or so...

So - we spent the night in our wonderful suite and woke up to a foggy and drizzly morning.

Undeterred I went for a chilly walk around the lake - it was still beautiful.


There was a lot more walking you could do - BUT breakfast called. The hotel is huge - and Kathy had gotten pretty worn out by the walk to dinner the night before. So we decided to have breakfast in our suite. Which I wish I had taken a picture of. It arrived on a little trolley that converted into a table and was complete with cute little jars of jam and even peanut butter...

After that we drove to Calgary (well - Kathy drove. this wrong side of the road thing freaked me out). The only thing of note on the way was an annimal overpass. To stop the animals from being run over, they started out by building tunnels under the road. But it turned out that a lot of animals (particularly the big ones like elk and bear) weren't keen on the tunnels. So, instead they have started building these overpasses with vegetation on top so the animals can walk over the road. They have fences along the side of the road as well - to stop them from crossing in other places.


Turns out that Calgary has a really confusing street naming system. On the face of it - it SEEMS logical - the numbered avenues run east west and the numbered streeets run north south. BUT what they have failed to take into account is that there is a big river running through the grid system and also a railway line. So it does some stuff that seems a bit on the silly side to me - like you are driving along 9th street and the bridge crosses the river at an angle so the other side becomes 10th street. And they renumber from some point - so that there are 2 first streets. and then they randomly called one of the streets after someone and skipped a number... In spite of this we managed to find our hotel - which turned out to be really central.

I hopped on the tram - which was right outside the door - and made for the city centre where I managed to find the Devonian gardens - which are interesting because they are nearly all undercover. Calgary gets a bit too chilly for plants in the winter time.

The next day was really just a travelling day - drive to the airport, fly to Toronto, drive to the kathy and Kerry's lakeside cottage just out of Kingston. The highlight was that we got a nice new Air Canada plane which had a great in flight entertainment system. touch screens in the seat backs and the biggest range of movies and TV shows. I watched Kung Fu Panda (which I really enjoyed because I am a big baby) and a couple of Lifestyle TV shows.

Kerry left for the UK the next day and we headed back into town to their real house.

Kathy and I have mainly been just hanging out since then. I have been enjoying having access to a washing machine and sleeping in the same bed for several nights in a row. I have been grocery shopping and oohing and aahing at all the different things you get in the grocery stores here (it is crazy how interesting a grocery store in a different country can be!),

I have been to the giant pet store and been amazed at the range of haloween costumes for dogs (I was SO close to buying Gizmo a pirate outfit) and other amazing pet accessories. And I have been to Costco - where you can buy a big screen TV, a bed, a snowplough for your ATV, a washing machine, potatoes, meat, popcorn, books, toys, dogfood and ice cream all in the one store. It's very distracting.

Kathy's lovely friends, Elaine and Don and Sue and Ian, have also very kindly invited me to their homes. It is great to meet some of Kathy's friends. Both of them have lovely water features in their yards - I really need another pond! And I saw a cardinal and Elaine and Don's and hummingbirds at Sue and Ian's - as well as meeting the lovely dogs.

In a nod to the fact that I am a tourist, I went for a walk around Kingston and for a ferry ride around the 1000 Islands (of dressing fame). Kingston, as well as being the original capital of Canada (they had a lot of trouble deciding on a capital here - and Kingston, Toronto and Quebec all had a turn before they decided on Ottawa), is really close to the US border. The border runs right through the lake/seaway. And they had to divide up the 1000 (actually over 1800) islands so that the land area that went to the US and the land area that went to Canada was equal - they had a rule that the border wasn't allowed to go through the middle of any of the islands and had to be a certain distance from all the islands. Anyway - Canada ended up with more, littler islands and the US with fewer, bigger islands.

That's your educational fact for today.

Sorry there are no pictures - it's not letting me upload any today for some reason. Will try and retrofit them later.