Pets

So far, we’ve managed to avoid the accumulation of any animals in our house other than Jack the Cat who resides with the in-laws back in Australia. He’s been there long enough now (since we extended the house) that its hard to even really think of him as our cat. As the children grow older though, there’s mounting pressure for us to get some thing for them to torture bestow their love upon other than their parents (let’s face it we’re sure to be well on our way down the ‘cool curve’ at this stage).

One of the good things about having moved overseas is the ability to use the excuse that we can’t have a pet because we won’t be able to take it back to Australia. Hell, we might be able, but if someone else isn’t going to foot the bill, I’m not forking out for furry removals!

Emily may very well melt at the sight of anything fuzzy and cute, but even that hasn’t managed to sway me thus far.

Things did get dangerously close though. A couple of weeks ago Michael and Sam went to a science camp (camp over here does not involve sleeping there) and amongst all that happened, there, came home deciding that they had found a pet that they wanted.

A snake. Of course, what else would it be? When they excitedly told me about it, I asked if they had asked their mother (knowing full well what to expect).

“Yeah and she didn’t say no!” came the excited response. Emily and Thomas had even been there when Caroline had gone to pick the boys up, so they’d seen the snakes as well. So the limiting factor quickly became the ability to import the little critter into Australia. Turns out that getting them in is about as easy as getting them out (though probably more legal if you actually do it right) so for now, we are continuing with our pet free journey.

Of course, I personally believe that we should get it and just let it free when we leave if we can’t find someone else that wants to take it off our hands ... its only a tiny little corn snake after all.

Tour de Birchwood

Last year there was an event in Fort McMurray that we didn’t take part in, but arrived at the end of as we decided to go for a family walk. It was a family orientated bike race through the birchwood forest and it looked like a lot of fun.

So this year, when it popped up again, we decided to take part. The kids got to go first, round a short 1km loop that went through the forest for 500m or so and then back along a bitumen path. Emily and Thomas’ age group went around once, Michael and Sam’s three times.

I missed Thomas’ as I was back home fetching the rest of the bicycles that we’d need to compete. Things were looking good for us because there was only about 5 adults enrolled. Possible prizes loomed.

Thomas enjoyed his short run so much that he went round with the big boys. I’m sure that part of that stemmed from the disappointment that was evident when he told me passionately that he would have come second or third if someone had knocked his stand down! He came in fifth. In the big boys race he cruised, saving himself for a final burst through to the crowd at the finish somewhere near the back of the pack. Michael and Sam came in fourth and fifth in their race.

Then came the adult race. An hour before the race there was probably 6 people going to be involved and I was looking forward to a nice quiet roll through the forest.

Then the lycra showed up.

Obviously these people were seasoned campaigners, showing up some 3 hours after the sign in deadline with their fancy bikes and lycra clad muscle bound bodies. Caroline and I exchanged knowing looks. Yep, hello last place.

Caroline took the kids home because they didn’t want to wait the hour and a half until our race after theirs. I spent some of that time talking to the people from the bike club that had organized the event and they let me know about some of the fun that we had to look forward to. Apparently there was going to be a bit of mud down the bottom of the gully but that there were some pallets and planks and things that had been put down to help get us through.

The time for the race rolled around and Caroline and I lined up at the back of the pack, happy to let the lycra brigade have their lead. As we took off through the first part, things weren’t too bad at all, cruising along on the flat, through the trees, I found myself moving past the first of the girls and even getting into the back of the guys’ pack. I was watching the odometer on the bike, knowing that the race was ‘only’ 15 kilometres long and therefore counting down those that were left as I attempted to measure the beats that were remaining in the old blood pump. There was a bit of mud in some of the dips, but nothing that would cause any concern. I was starting to think that this wouldn’t be so bad after all, even if some of those people I’d made my way past were now in front of me again.

And then we went down the hill. Now the the bastard part of this is that normally, down the hill means hands off the brakes and cruise. But the path was narrow enough and steep enough that going fast simply wasn’t an option.

And that’s when we hit the mud. Sure there were planks. Sure there were pallets. But somewhere in the discussion no one seemed to think to mention that the mud would be something like 3 inches deep! Or that to get onto a pallet, you’d have to get through a metre of the mud and then basically jump up onto the pallet. Or in fact, that some of the stretches of the mud would go for 20 metres! Sometimes I made it, sometimes I didn’t. And the biggest problem with the didn’ts was that it meant that I ended up walking through the mud and caking it onto my shoes. I wasn’t worried about getting dirty, but when you’re staring up a hill that is seemingly endless and more cliff like with every fading beat of your heart, it’s a bit bloody hard to pedal when your foot slides off every time you put the pressure on!

Needless to say, there was some pushing of the bike up the hills and at times, I was well and truly reminded of the time that I went and did a triathlon with exactly no training for it, because that was how much training I’d done for the bike race.

But I finished. Heart pumping, legs shaking, with a burst at the finish to get a second ahead of the guy that had been in front of me I sailed across the finish line in some 39 minutes. I expected something of a wait for Caroline based on how hard I’d found it, but she came across in 44 minutes, far from last place.

We had survived the tour de birchwood.

Yellowstone Pt 5. - The Long Road Home

Having seen much of the Yellowstone park by this point in time and having driven a bloody long way to get there, we thought that we should at least spend a day seeing the Grand Teton National Park seeing how close it was relative to our Fort Mac abode.

So once again, we piled the kids in the car and set out to drive. Straight into a traffic jam. Yep, even in the national parks those lovely folks that keep things running need time to repair roads. So we spent the first hour or so of our day alternately stopped and crawling through the traffic, knowing that the end of the day was going to look much the same. Yippee.

It had been hoped (and hyped) that we would get to see a lot more wildlife in the Tetons as the park was expected to be less busy than the better known Yellowstone, but by the time that we’d driven from one end of the park almost to the other end, including a stop for lunch over-looking a gorgeous lake, mountains seeming to rise up from the interface there hadn’t been anything particularly exciting to see (ie nothing we hadn’t managed to spot already).

The big hope for the whole day was to see a moose (or more … meese? I think not). So having reached the end of the park we stopped at the visitor’s centre and Caroline asked about where we should go to see them and what the best time of day was. Of course the best time of day was dusk (by which time we had firm intent of being ensconced around the campfire with a beverage or two) but we hadn’t been through the best part of the park for spotting them yet.

There had also been hopes of fitting in a white water rafting ride, but through the Tetons this was offered more as a ‘drift’. This may have provided a great way of seeing moose, but I wanted the rush of blood that would come with the white water. Add to that the prospect of the exercise taking 3 hours and finishing around dinner time and it just proved too much to consider. After all, we still had to get back through all the construction work.

We buckled ourselves back in the car and took an alternate route back to Yellowstone, stopping for a walk, always hoping for the elusive moose, but by the time we were out of the Tetons, we hadn’t spotted one. We crawled back through the road works, made it to camp and at least managed to enjoy our dinner.

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I thought that it was about time that I managed to finish off the last part of our Yellowstone trip and so once again I find myself sitting around a camp fire with the computer, blogging. This time we’re at Faucet Lake (no, I don’t know if it’s shaped like a tap).

We departed Yellowstone and began the long trek home (well, the destination was actually Drumheller, from where Caroline would deliver me to an airport and I would fly back for work for a week. We passed through the endless trees of the park again, Caroline peering hopefully, desperate for a glimpse of that elusive moose. We only struck one animal-jam on the way out and it wasn’t too bad. There’s a small section of road that is labeled no stopping because it’s a bald eagle reserve. There happened to be some bald eagles present so of course people stopped and took photos.

We drove all the way through Montana and back to the border crossing without anything untoward or worthy of note happening with the intent of trying to camp at Writing on Stone Provincial park. We hadn’t booked or anything, we just though that we’d rock up to a really popular park in the middle of the peak tourist season and stay the night. Well we managed to get as far as the town before Writing on Stone and there was a lovely sign posted saying that their RV park was full. Bugger.

We went to the RV park in the town that we were in, thinking we’d just stop there (after all, it was about 10:30pm at this point in time but they were full as well. We were offered the opportunity to pay $12 for the privilege of setting up in their carpark for the night, but declined such loving hospitality.

Instead, we drove on, hoping to find a park somewhere else. We found the small town of Warner which had a lovely little lions park in it (with all of about 12 sites) and so stopped and set up at 11:30pm, once again glad not to be in the tent trailer. Everything was great until about 7:30am. That was when we were woken by a deep base rumble that seemed to resonate through our very bones. One of those things you don’t notice when its 11:30pm at night is just how close you are to the local rail siding. Two lovely diesel locos, travelling as a light engine had pulled in to the siding and there they sat, idling. Their arrival had seemed to pass about a foot outside the door of the van so loud and close was it, but in reality there was probably a good 200m to the siding. Yippee. We were up fairly soon after that, because those locos were waiting for something and no one was about to shut them down while they waited. At about 10;30 a freight train passed trough and I said to Caroline that they were probably waiting for the cross and would be off soon. Well when we left the park an hour later, they were still there and still idling.

We made it to Drumheller and set up camp, excited that the next day, we’d get to see the dinosaurs.

Ever since last year’s aborted attempt to see the Royal Tyrrell Museum I have been hanging out for a chance to get back there and really not expecting to get the opportunity and so I was insisting that we be there as soon as they opened. Well of course that didn’t happen, but we weren’t too far off and enjoyed getting there before most of the crowd.

Caroline signed everyone up for a fossil casting session which was good fun and then we continued our exploration. I’ll attach some photos because it really was awesome.

And then of course I was dropped off at the airport and abandoned the family in Drumheller as I returned to work. Lucky me.