And then they were gone

We have been very spoilt for the last 3 weeks or so in having my parents visiting from back home. (I started this at least a week ago ... but have taken a long time to get around to finishing it).

If there's one thing you learn from such a visit, it is of course the old adage that you don't know just how much you miss something until it is gone. Having Mum and Dad here in our home for a week was too short, but additionally wonderful. It was great for the kids to have the chance to spend some time with Nanny and Poppa.



It all fitted in very well and it was incredibly nice to have some help with some of those little jobs that I haven't seemed to find the time to get to, not to mention the fact that they were here every night when I got home from work.

Of course it was always going to be a short term thing and the Sunday upon which they left came around way too quickly. There were a couple of stand out moments on that final day for me that cause a welling of tears, threatening the barriers that held them back.



We went to church in the morning and as always, seating is something of an issue. We don't exactly get there early enough to have a pick of seats and with 6 of us we often struggle to all sit together so with 8 there was no hope. We found 5 seats with 4 in front and so Caroline and I sat down and were promptly joined by all of the kids. Thomas was sitting next to me but of course Emily was most indignant that she wasn't next to Daddy.

I suggested to Thomas that he might like to move but he wasn't going to until I pointed out that it would be his last chance to sit with Nanny and Poppa at church. he was off like a shot and i don't think i'll ever forget the look on his face as he stood quietly by his Poppa's side, gazing up and waiting for Poppa to notice that he was there. The exchanged look when Dad did notice won't be leaving my memoray any time soon either.

Later in the day we were back at home and Sam had taken out his home made kite to see if he could fly it. I, being the doubter than I am, didn't think that it would ever fly and was inside busy loading photos onto a digital photo frame for Caroline's Mum and Dad. Well the kite must have flown a bit because later on Dad came in asking if I had a ladder other than that which was my grandfather's. The kite was stuck up a tree, beyond reach and unlikely to come down any time soon with it's tail wrapped around several branches.

We investigated various ways of reaching it, but it looked like a lost cause to me. I had written the kite off. But Dad had managed to understand Sam much better than I had and had picked up on the fact that the kite was one that Sam had made at school in Australia (where as I thought he'd made it locally). Dad persevered and the kite was salvaged, with Sam showing due pleasure. It was a lovely moment to have had Poppa do that for him.

The final moment that sticks with me was at the airport where we finally had to say goodbye. Thomas came up to me and said with glistening eyes, "I'm going to miss Nanny and Poppa." As I relayed this to Mum, we both fought back tears.



The drive home was hard, something to do with unseasonal levels of moisture under the eyelids and that night was strangely quiet.

Now we're left counting the days until our next visitors get here (105 as of this moment)

Turn that way ... no, the OTHER WAY!

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve managed to drive from Toronto to Montreal, to Quebec City, to Lake Placid, to Rochester and finally to Niagara Falls. One of the things that I’ve been meaning to buy whilst we’re away is a GPS unit. Until I actually manage to do so however, we have been reliant on maps and the good old combination of Caroline navigating and me following the instructions.

Now at this point, you’re probably expecting that there’s likely to be some criticism of the navigational portion of that equation, but the reality is that Caroline is actually a great navigator. Its my inner sense of doubt and apprehension that probably gets us into more trouble, because I hate nothing more than the feeling that I don’ t know that I am headed in the wrong direction. And so I would have to say that as many of the u-turns that we’ve enjoyed were my fault as opposed to navigational error and the navigational errors tended more to be the result of a lack of a map of appropriate detail or scale than directional misfortune.

It all came to something of a head last night after a couple of hours of hurried outlet shopping in the US as we tried to find the right bridge to get us across to the Canadian side of the falls whilst paying the least amount of toll possible.

It was about the point that we were trying to head the right way onto the 104 that things went wrong. The main reason they went’ wrong was because again, there wasn’t enough detail on the map and I made an assumption that we needed to go one way and Caroline only looked up to tell me that I should have gone the other way at the point that we were committed to going where we shouldn’t.

Not to worry, you simply take the next exit, get off and then turn around and come back the way that you came. Unless you’re me. Then you get off, get back on and find yourself back on the road that you wanted to be on, but still going in the wrong direction. Another exit fixed that and we eventually found our way back to the point of the first error.

But by this time, Caroline was seeing the funny side of a situation to which I was far from amused, resulting in her being in a fit of giggles and me being, well ‘a grumpy bastard’ probably understates it.

All things come out ok in the wash though and we managed to take a slow, scenic route, run a red light and finally make our way onto the bridge that brought us back to Canada. We even found the hotel.

I still intend to buy the GPS unit though, even if I do get it at a point where I really only have one option to travel by on the way back to Fort McMurray!

The Falls

We find ourselves tonight at Niagara Falls. Wow. It’s hard to describe the beauty of this place and the wonder that it inspires. Despite the hordes of tourists around the place and the gaudy Vegas-like entertainment strip, the falls themselves are worthy of the visit. I don’ think verbal or written description can truly do the falls justice, they are simply amazing.

We went for a ride on the Maid of the Mist this afternoon, the boat that takes you right up to the horseshoe falls (there’s actually two major components to the falls) and the sheer volume of water that pours over the cliff every second is mind blowing. I simply can’t imagine what inspired some bloke to go over the falls in a barrel. In about 1901 none-the-less. And he survived. Some kid actually survived falling over the falls in nothing more than a life vest at some point early in the same century and if it was your kid that you saw going over, you’d have to think that it was the last time that you were ever going to see them. Its just a monstrous amount of water.

Its 9pm at the moment and apparently they light up the falls at night. Hopefully once Mum and Dad come back from their walk, Caroline and I will get a chance to go out there and have a look ourselves and see it.

Go ... Australia?

So here we are in the middle of the olympics and we're touring all around North America. It's made for an interesting and different experience of the olympics from what I am accustomed to.

For the first couple of days we were in Eastern Canada and so watching Canadian broadcasts of the event. Right now though, we're in Lake Placid, home of the 1980 (and 1932) winter games in the good ol' US of A.

THe canadian broadcasts I've found in the main to be quite watchable. One of those things about Canada, is they don't have quite as many athletes featuring in medal winning events. That means that although they focus on the Canadian atheletes when ever they can, they tend to show a wide variety of other teams as well. And their commentary doesn't appear to be too biased.

But now, in the US, my god, what a difference. Its all america all the time. Australia might rate a mention if we happen to win a medal, but its a big chest thumping, self congratulating style of presentation. It may be the same back home when someone from outside of Australia is subjected to our TV coverage (hell, even I've complained about the sort of coverage we get at home .. swimming swimming and more swimming ... but this has sure rammed it home!

The Bastard Tour of Canada

Caroline’s cousin Klemens came to stay with us for a couple of weeks last month and it was great to have him out. There were moments though, when reflecting upon his time with us, that I had to rate it as something of a bastard’s tour of Canada.

It wasn’t all bad, it was probably just a piece of it that really doesn’t sound all that good upon reflection.

Klemens landed in Calgary and Caroline and the kids picked him up from the airport. One of the first experiences that he was treated to was the Calgary Stampede. Sounds great. But then one has to consider that he was attending this wondrous event with Caroline and the four kids in tow! I believe his comment was something along the lines of ‘its very busy, isn’t it?” in reference to the efforts associated with successfully negotiating such an event with the four children (he is one of four himself, so by the time he left I think that he had a new-found respect for what his own parents had been through when he was growing up).

He was left to spend the latter part of the evening by himself when Caroline brought the kids back to our accommodations and from a couple of conversations we had, I’m sure he appreciated some of the finer points of the cow’girl’ population.

After that, the next thing that we decided to do to him was sit him in the back of the car with the smalls and casually take off for Montana. Then, the following day, show him all the lovely scenery from a bus, make him sit and mind the pizza with us while some people went horse-riding (admittedly it was by his choice that he wasn’t part of the equestrian activities) and then bus it back down the mountain.

Then, there was another long drive in the car, a stop at a decaying and no-longer used aqueduct (the risk of travelling with engineers) and then even more driving until we stayed at Dinosaur Provincial Park. Even there we gave him a chance to have some time alone and sent him off to climb to the top of the formations and capture the sunset (only to find out the next day that he hadn’t actually made it all the way tot the top as he’d stopped halfway up!)

Of course, with the dawn came another day and another car ride in the back of the car with the kids. This time we had to get all the way back to Fort McMurray, but we decided that we should be make a stop at the actual Dinosaur museum that lives just outside of Drumheller. It was an impressive looking building that held great promise. But because this was the bastard tour of Canada, all we did was look at the outside, glance at the café and tell Klemens that it was time to get back in the car, visit the supermarket in town for some food and off we went again, driving solidly until about 10:30pm that night when we finally arrived back in Fort McMurray.

We said goodbye to Klemens a week after that and I think that I can say that he actually had a good time and we did manage to send him out drinking with a couple of girls from work, so he wasn’t caged for the entire time1