I find myself at home alone again which is my cue to write something in the old blog. It’s been quite a while, and the last post I wrote didn’t even get put on Bloglovin’ which is sort of the default site for my stuff.
Anyways, as to why I am alone. My daughter rescued a dog. No, not from a local shelter, but from frickin’ Morocco. She had to pay a bunch of fees, and the place in Casablanca would send her dog to Vancouver. Except when the time came, the Moroccans told her they were only sending the dog as far as Montreal and she would have to pick it up. Montreal, she explained, was the same distance to her, give or take, as Casablanca was to Moscow. In the end, after much arguing and some testy texts, a rescue group in Montreal is forwarding her dog on to Vancouver.
My wife is going with her, so our daughter can love her new pet up on the ride home and try to keep it happy. Of course, she had to pay some extra fees to make this all happen.
Today is our 25th anniversary. Yay Us! It seems odd to spend it apart, but there wasn’t going to be a parade either way.
We just got back from a whirlwind trip to Alberta that will have to be our holiday for the year. We weren’t comfortable hanging around other provinces as there is still some hysteria about COVID-19 and incidents of abuse and vandalism, so we did a hit and run. My uncle was visiting his old buddy in Alberta and we agreed to come pick him up as the central theme of our holidays. We bolted here to Calgary on the first day. When we got into town our GPS guide got drunk and sent us back and forth all over town which of course initiated yelling and irritation in our vehicle. Before any actual hand-to-hand combat broke out, we called my niece and who gave us calm and useful directions to her house where we ate and crashed for the night. She also gave me a couple new ideas for enchilada assembly, which I plan to put to use soon. The next morning I scraped the frost off our windshield, knowing that back home in Abbotsford it was forecast to be 31C that day. Once we could see and had our prissy little heated seats ready, we waved goodbye to my lovely niece and headed northeast to Irricana. There we scooped up my uncle who was, like us, grateful to be headed back to summertime.
Day one on the road home we dawdled around, stopping at Canmore first, then Lake Louise. Alberta is mostly flat and grasslands, but the Rockies are amazing! We paid our $20 and entered the Banff/Jasper National Parks. This drive is 230 km of non-stop mountains and jagged peaks, usually reflected in some glacial lake.
We were stopping every beautiful spot we encountered until it dawned on us that we had driven about 30 km in an hour, and were on pace to hit Jasper by Christmas. So we picked up the pace, clicking pictures of nature through our car windows until we became fatigued of glaciers and wildlife and towering peaks.
Once we got out of the parks we drove to Valemount and checked into our hotel. It was a little downtrodden and sad, but we slept like statues for 9 hours and started over.
Day two of the trip we stuffed our faces with muffins and coffee in the continental breakfast area, then left town. First stop was Well’s Grey Park north of Clearwater. We stopped at Spahats Falls just inside the park boundaries to see the sights. It was a dizzyingly high waterfall that dropped into a narrow rocky gorge. Creepy thing: there was a cross and some flowers there for some young woman who went around the protective fencing and slipped off the cliff a couple years ago. Why? Believe me if you haven’t been there – it doesn’t look like a good idea.
We were nearly on empty so we had to turn back and not explore any more of the park. We fueled up then drove to Kamloops where we bickered about lunch, got shit from some woman about getting too close to her with my germs, and had a little picnic in the mall parking lot. Then we set off for Merritt. We decided to take the old highway through the Nicola Valley, expecting it to add a little extra time to the trip, but what we got was multiple construction delays which set us back quite a while. Still, it is a gorgeous valley so it was worth it in the end. After that was the mundane and familiar highway home, another year’s vacation expended.