Carrick to Calgary

Our new blog can now be reached at:

River City Adventures

See you there!

J&P

Hello, I must be going.
I cannot stay,
I came to say
I must be going.
I'm glad I came
but just the same
I must be going.
For my sake you must stay,
for if you go away,
you'll spoil this party
I am throwing.
I'll stay a week or two,
I'll stay the summer through,
but I am telling you,
I must be going.


(click here for sound)

It's been a long, strange and wonderful ride here at Carrick to Calgary, but all good things must come to an end, and so must we. This is our 225th post in just over 2 years (1 post every 3.24 days or so, a bit more at the start and a little less recently we must admit), and we've had a great time recording our experiences here and reflecting on our time in Canada so far.

However, as regular readers will know, time has caught up with this blog, and we're no longer in Calgary. We moved to Edmonton about 2 months ago, and the frequency of our blog updates has dropped rather dramatically because we've been up to our eyes getting used to our new lives, new jobs and our new house. It's amazing how little time you have left to blog when life just keeps happening around you! However, things are starting to settle down again, and so it's time to get back to the blog.

We considered just updating our blog title to "Carrick-to-Calgary-to-Edmonton" but we thought it would be a bit of a mouthful. There were a couple of other options, such as "Welcome to E-Town" and "New Edmontonians", but in the end we settled on a title that we hope captures some of the spirit of our new home and the attitude we have to the experiences we hope to have in our time here. Edmonton is E-Town and the City of Champions, but it's also known as The River City, so ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our new blog, ...

River City Adventures (Go on, click it and have a look!)

We also took the opportunity to change a few other things about the blog. For instance, it always took a long time to blog using Blogger because we had to export the images from iPhoto, re-size and rename them, then upload them to an FTP server and then write the links to each image by hand. So we've switched over to using iWeb, which is an integrated OS X client which allows us to drag-and-drop images into each page. It's also got some nice themes, and allows better control over image and text style than poor old Blogger. Plus it integrates with iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband, so it allows us to link images, music, movies and podcasts to our blog. Anyway, to cut a long story short, have a look at our new blog, and keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming posts.

So that's Goodbye to Carrick to Calgary, but of course it's also Goodbye to Calgary. We had a great time over our 2 years in CowTown: we made a lot of new friends and had some wonderful new experiences. We also had a lot of wonderful visitors and most of our regular readers managed to make it over to spend a few weeks with us. Our lives, our jobs and our careers changed quite a bit in Calgary, and of course if we hadn't been in Calgary we would never have ended up in E-Town. Don't get us wrong, though, as we're quite happy to have moved on from Calgary. The main benefit to having moved is that we now have our own house again and we've been busy taking bits of it apart, building other bits of it up and generally making it our own. There will be lots of pictures on the new blog of our various projects, so keep your eyes peeled.

So it's officially goodbye to the past, goodbye to Calgary and hello to the future and hello to Edmonton! See you over at River City Adventures!

Love
J&P

After all of our running about and the seemingly incessant round of 'jobs' that needed to be done to move stuff from home, move stuff from Calgary, move into our new home, unpack everything, take up new positions (J), and an office move for me, we decided that a short break was in order. So on the 10th of August, off we trundled towards the mountains and Jasper. Its a straightforward drive - about 4 hours including a short pit stop and a quick grocery shop in Hinton. We had decided to go back to the Patricia Lake Bungalows, which are situated on the shores of Patricia Lake (funnily enough!), just about 5km north of Jasper townsite. We'd been there for a short break last July (when I seem to remember that it rained most of the time), but it is such a wonderful, peaceful, quiet and relaxing place that we really didn't consider going anywhere else. Last year, we had been in one of the more traditional cabins (think biggish garden shed with windows), but because we booked so late this year, we had a limited choice of accommodation. Luckily enough, we were limited to one of the new lodgings, which are definitely not like garden sheds.... this time, think small modern apartment with stunning views....



The Grove at Patricia Lake is the start (I think) of a gradual modernising process being undertaken by the family who own the place, and they have done a great job. The decor is lovely, and the whole place is fully equipped with just about everything you need for a self-catering operation.

Bedroom...




View from sofa to kitchen/dining area (or should that be dining 'nook' in Canadian parlance?)



Sitting nook(!)...



Better view of the kitchen - four full size gas burners and a combi microwave/oven...



This is the view of the outside - the chimney isn't quite clad yet, and you can see one of the more traditional cabins just to the left of the picture...



This is me - I went outside to read, and it was just so quiet, and just so peaceful, with a little bit of sun...I think I might have just been resting my eyes for a little bit...



This is J being slightly more active than me - minding the BBQ...



And what was in the BBQ - ribs and corn - its that corn time of year here...



So, that was about it... we read, played some new board games, went walking, sat on the dock on the lake, yelled at the mountain (great echoes...)...

In fact, here is the mountain as viewed from the sofa in our accommodation...



All too soon it was time to hit the road to come home again... we made a stop for an hour or two at the hot springs at Miette (about 22km of the main road between Jasper and E-town), where we encounted a flock of very tame rocky mountain sheep (or possibly goats - no, I think they were sheep...)



We were slightly tempted by this sign on the way home, but thought better of it as the electrician was booked to come the following day...



More later.....