Carrick to Calgary

Good news this morning - I actually slept long enough to be woken up by the alarm clock at 06:15! The last couple of mornings I've woken up at 2am and then 4am and it's quite miserable to lie awake at that time of the morning wishing you could be asleep. Then of course when tea-time comes, you feel a bit sick and ready to go to bed again, so jet lag stops you going out for dinner. But at last that feeling is starting to recede... I'll be fully acclimatised to the UK time zone just in time to go back to Canada again! The conference here in Dublin is excellent, plenty of Big Names talking, and also getting to catch up with some old friends and get an idea of the current/future job scene here in N.I. surgery. We had a free-ish afternoon yesterday and I took a walk from the Landsdowne Road into central Dublin. One thing that's very different from Calgary is that there are so many people crammed into such a small space here - almost no room to walk on the pavement just from the pressure of people. There are a million souls in Calgary, but the city itself is so big that the actual 'people density' is quite low. And if you go to hiking in Banff or Kananaskis you can be sure that you won't see another soul for hours at a time. Happy flying to Denise and Roy today, who are heading off to Calgary with Air Canada. Hopefully they won't be delayed just as long as I was... I'm just missing them as I'm arriving in Belfast Central Station about 9pm... Home again... it's gonna be a weird 72 hours, seeing Carrick again after 12 months away...

J