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28-30 July Wetaskiwin - quadding

28 July

This morning on the drive up to Wetaskiwin, I learnt that while the road was undeniably straight, the countryside was not flat, with those negative connotations of not having any hills. but open. Brenda was home.

I found an ATM & tried to get some money out, but as well even though it insisted on communicating entirely in french, it managed to convey the message that it was not going to give me any money with anything short of explosives, or failing that, somebody else’s card. I was beginning to detect a pattern here. (more…)

25-27 July Banff to Calgary - animals?

25 July

Due to the limited number of ways to spend money, we decided that the best activity was to have a bit of a wander up one of the hills. The one which looked most promising, the locals called Sulphur Mountain. We could go up on a gondola, or we could save the $20 (Canadian), and walk up you could catch the gondola down for free (1 guess it uses less electricity that way). The cheap way seemed to be the perfect option. Especially as I had been told that you could hurt yourself on that ground if those cables snapped, and preferred my ground close to my feet and not accelerating towards me at 9m per second per second. Odd I know. (more…)

2-5 July Calgary, Drumheller & Coaldale - dinosaurs and lemons

24 July

Still disappointed by my bear experience, we drove on to Banff, through more lovely scenic mountains, which looked disappointingly similar to all of the other lovely scenic mountains & tended to

[Ed. -At this point either Pat found a bear, and it was not of the local vegetarian type -or he wandered off and forgot to finish the sentence. ..we shall await with baited breath, the next exciting installment!]

Do you really think that I am the sort of person who would just wander off and forget that they were in the middle of something? No. A bear came for me. A big one. And I had no carrots. Why would I be carrying carrots? Luckily, after some effort I managed to convince the bear that a drink (which I was carrying), would be even better than carrots, and we departed friends. (more…)

19-23 July Vancouver Island & back - not so tropical islands and vegetarian bears

19 July

While the caravan park we were at was cheap, uncrowded, on the beach, a unanimous decision was made by all of those with voting rights in such matters, and decided that Portaloos were just not the required standard. My comment that they were the cleanest Portaloos I had ever seen did not appear to sway the decision any. So we drove off to Victoria looking for another one. We drove right past the dive store I had been recommended in Waterton, so we stopped and I arranged a dive for the next evening. We eventually found another camp site which had been decided, was more suitable. Unfortunately it looked a lot like a carpark, but it had nice toilets. (more…)

16-18 July Osoyoos to Vancouver Island - what a gas

16 July.

Today we drove on to Osoyoos. which is Canada’s only desert area. Quite a nice looking spot with a lovely lake in the middle which provided irrigation to the orchards around it. .Osoyoos lake cuts across the US border. and because the US gets a bit annoyed with boaties who go over the border without filling in the requisite forms, there is a row of buoys across the lake marking where Canada stops and the us begins. (more…)