OK, Sheryn - this one's for you!

Sheryn, sweetheart, I think everyone else in the world has given up on this blog, but your begging has been rewarded: I am sitting here and ready to type!

Not that I know where to begin. It has been a month since I wrote here, but I've been on Facebook most days since so you know most of what we've done. I'll try for a recap though...

After leaving the Rockies, we went to Calgary and were disappointed to find it was just another city. We are traveling earlier than peak season, and had found lots and lots of events, tours and businesses that shut down for the winter hadn't opened yet. Try explaining THAT to the kids as you drive past a fantastic-looking fairground! We did go to the zoo in Calgary which was enjoyable.

Leaving Calgary, we went east, heading for Winnipeg. We stopped at Medicine Hat, AB (and saw the worlds largest tepee - a cone of steel poles without canvas), Moose Jaw, SK (met a new friend, Barb, who an Aussie friend introduced me to before we left), Piapot, SK (stopped for a meal at a lovely saloon in a ghost town with a population of 49, including dogs), Moosomin, SK (gorgeous campground, but my enduring memory of this place is that I did laundry. Woo hoo), then Winnipeg, MB! This trip across Canada in the Trans Canada Highway was really wonderful. Like driving east to west in southern Australia, the landscape changes dramatically and significantly at the provincial borders. We left the mountains and traveled through open plains, rolling agricultural land, oil fields (looked like farms with pumps, not massive derricks or anything - not ugly!). We didn't leave the highway, and missed lots of fantastic places, I know, but we really loved the drive and found so much to look at and talk about. It was a LOT more attractive to me than the Stuart Highway! We had some really nice times with people - one another of course, but also strangers we met as we traveled. One of my favourite exchanges was in Moose Jaw, SK. We had lunch with Barb, and after she left, a woman chatted to us asking where we were from and so on. We said we were on holidays and she said "In Saskatoon??" as though it were the last place on earth people would travel to!

In Winnipeg, we stayed with Mat's good mate Cory and his wife Masami and their three boys. They are so generous with hospitality and made us so welcome - which is amazing considering there's 6 of us and a 31 foot caravan! They live in the inner city in a 3 storey house on a small block of land. The houses in Canada are different so I'm not sure how to describe it. I reckon it looked like a Newtown terrace house, but not attached to any other. It was a 100 year old place that has been renovated, and it was so pretty - I like the idea of living in something similar, although the stair were very steep and I would need lots more practice to wander around in the dark without worrying about falling down!

We did lovely stuff pretty much every day, and I am struggling to remember everything now. Cory's older sister, Stephanie, is a high school friend of mine and it was wonderful to catch up with her and meet her husband and kids. She has a daughter the same age as Miranda and they became great mates quickly - even having a sleep over one night. The whole family have been friends with Mat's for a million years, and they were just so much fun to spend time with. We were fed and entertained and shown around Winnipeg and had such a great time. I really loved the Mennonite Historical Village where we went on the rainy Victoria Day long weekend. Miranda now knows how to grind flour and wash clothes in a mangle which are skills I hope she finds good use for! Masami took me to a spa one night which was wonderful; hot springs and pools are very easy to find around here, and are so relaxing and warming when the weather is cold. I loved The Forks in Winnipeg too; it's where the Assiniboice and Red Rivers meet and has been a meeting place for Aboriginal people through Winnipeg's history. The Children's Museum was a hands-on play museum - a cross between Play Shack and Questicon. The Manitoba Museum was fantastic; lots of Aboriginal and flora/fauna exhibits (they had a platypus!) as well as colonisation history.

While we were in Winnipeg, my friend Jenni traveled from Alabama to spend a weekend with us. You read about it on Facebook, but I don't know if I told you how I know Jenni? We met online about 10 years ago at a "Left Behind" message board (remember those books?) and became good friends. A group of us from that message board went on to set up our own site and of the 14 of us (I think that's right!), 10 live in the US and some have met up a few times. One lives in Scotland, one in London, one in Auckland and me in Australia. Our Londoner went to the Kiwis wedding, which was so cool; I'm the second non-USian to meet up with anyone. It was an absolutely wonderful weekend. Jenni and I have never even spoken on the telephone during our decade-long friendship, and we joked about it being our first date and all the rest, but it was honestly just like catching up with a friend I spoke to only a fortnight before - because we have spoken so often and about so much for such a long time. We went walking, talking, eating and laughing for a couple of days, and saying "see you later" was really hard! Catalina particularly had become very attached too which was sweet. Jenni had traveled something like 3000km across an international border to spend two days with me - it was SO precious. Blows my mind.

And now we're heading west again, this time with Cory, Masami and their kids (they are heading into the Rockies and we're joining them to return to Lake Louise before we go back to Vancouver). We traveled first to their family campground near Piney, MB (actually south east of Winnipeg) and spent two days in a fantastic cabin which was on a huge block of mostly uncleared bushland. No mains electricity and no running water, which is more rustic than I like, but the cabin itself was really terrific with comfy beds and a wood stove inside. We barbecued mostly, and had a lovely fire, and Cory has built a wood-fire hot tub which was bliss. The long drop toilet and ticks were not so nice, but we survived. LOL - I would have been a lousy pioneer!!! The kids loved playing with garter snakes, too! :) After leaving the cabin, we went to Riding Mountain Park, which was really pretty - and I loved a coffee shop/book shop/artisan shop in Onanole... honestly, it was like my fantasy heaven! We saw our first (and so far only) bear in the wild - but it scarpered so quickly it could have just as easily been Sasquatch! We stopped in Brandon, too, because I wanted to check out the Commonwealth Air Training Program museum. My grandfather spent a lot of time in Winnipeg in 1940 as he trained as a wireless operator for service in the Air Force during WWII. It was a really interesting museum.

After Brandon we spent the night at Moose Mountain Provincial Park, Saskatoon. It was gorgeous and the houses were lovely. It reminded me of the NSW Central Coast for some reason - at least, the Central Coast 20 years ago without all the people and traffic! If they didn't have obscene winters and they had work for Mat, I would love to move here! It really was beautiful. Nice campground, too - and we met a little girl named Miranda who was 6, whose birthday was in Novemeber. They didn't look at all alike, but I thought the coincidence was cool. Our Miranda was a week older. :)

We spent another night in Moose Jaw and I got to catch up with Barb again which was a hoot. From Moose Jaw we went to Medicine Hat and made a fuel stop. We shouldn't have. 6 weeks + of driving without incident and on Monday afternoon as he pulled the caravan past the bowser, Mat clipped the rear corner of the caravan on the steel barricade at the end of the row. No damage to the post. Extraordinary how much damage was done to the camper! The awning support was ripped off, the bumper was half ripped off and somehow it all made the rear wall get skewed so the rear-end wasn't square. The joins to the side walls separated, the bunk beds attached to the rear end detached, the bathroom sink pulled off the wall (just the silicone I think), the bathtub popped it's plastic rivets. Groan. Mat and Cory worked their tails off - in the drizzly cold rain - to get everything squared and the bumper reattached and lights working etc. We had dinner at Maccas and the kids got to play in the Play Place. We rang the hire company and were told that because no other vehicle was involved, we didn't need to make a police report and that we should head to Calgary to return it to their depot there. Not cool - I missed Drumheller and the Hoo Doos AGAIN!!!

We spent a night and a day in Calgary sorting things out - which meant getting railed at for NOT making a police report, parting with a huge amount of money and moving house. Which was no where near as painful as moving out of Canonbury, but still wasn't fun. :) The new caravan is nicer in many ways - lots more light and it feels spacier, but it does lack storage space. Anyway, we left Calgary and rejoined Cory & co in Canmore which has been a terrific place to spend the last couple of nights. We have shopped and eaten and toured, and really enjoyed a day at the Banff Hot Springs yesterday and a nice driving tour of Lake Minnewanka (yeah, seriously). Two Jack Lake is stunning, and we enjoyed taking a walk around in the late evening even though it was pretty cold yesterday (about 7C and drizzly). We got home after 10pm and the kids didn't get up until about 8.30am (oddly, just about the time I started typing this blog!). We're leaving today to go back to Lake Louise where we'll see it wet (not solid like on Mothers Day) and we'll ride the gondola. Sadly, we'll part company from Cory & co here, and head back to Vancouver on the weekend.

So, blogging hasn't been a big priority, clearly! I loved blogging when we were in Adelaide for a month and really looked forward to writing it and reading peoples comments. I guess a travel blog is different to a "our son is in hospital having his head remodeled" blog. :D Certainly this trip has been so much more fun!

We have just 2 weeks left in Canada now, and we either need someone to offer us a job, or a huge pile of money, or we need to come back to Darwin and send Matty back to the office. Mat is just now starting to worry about where we're going to live!! Boys. Having moved out of Canonbury, we need to find a rental - and there just doesn't seem to be anything in Darwin or Palmerston under $500 a week, which is obscene. Still, we are going to trust the future to be taken care of and we're cramming as much beauty and adventure into these last days as we can. We don't want our snow change to end!