wow, so I really have a big update, don’t I?

I’m going to do this by adding a bit to the end of this posting every day or so until I get to niagara, and then I’ll start making new entries. so keep checking back and scrolling down…

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BEFORE THE BIG TRIP…

first off, as most of you know, my road trip to ontario was delayed by a week because I ended up in an unfortunate car accident, and it took just over a week for steve to get his new parts and be ready to go. so dana delayed her flight out here, and I packed up my stuff, and spent as much last-minute time as I could with martin and my friends.

there were boxes EVERYWHERE, in every room…

I didn’t delay the scheduled movers, so I still had to have everything ready for them by the end of may. they came as scheduled, and did a FANTASTIC job of blanketing everything and taking care with my stuff…

…now let’s just hope everything arrives at it’s destination in one piece!

in another stroke of bad luck, tasha got attacked by one of the dogs who live upstairs (I know, ironic that the dog-killer should be the one to BE attacked), which resulted in a nasty, nasty abcess on her ear … ew …

… so off to the vet we went for yet another round of antibiotics!

one of the last things I had to do besides clean the apartment, was take apart my bed. I decided that it’s an old bed, seen far better days, and that I’m going to treat myself to a great new bed once I get a place in niagara. so I proceeded to lift the top mattress off of the futon below, and what do I see?

that’s right, a potato. a potato. what the hell?

so how on earth did a potato get between my mattresses? it has obviously not been there the entire two years that I’ve owned the bed, but yet it’s older than a couple of months, because it’s wrinkly and growing eyes. again, what the hell? I felt like someone was playing a very odd princess-and-the-pea joke on me. maybe that’s why I haven’t been sleeping well lately???

after that, dana arrived and we did some fun last-minute vancouvery stuff like eat very yummy sushi…

and visit the vancouver aquarium (way, way more cool photos to come later)…

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DAY ONE…

before I knew it, it was all over and we had to pack up the car and leave. just like that. and let me tell you, it was a good thing that dana was driving that first day, because there were about a million times during that first hour leaving vancouver that I would have turned back if I were the one at the wheel. I love you all out in niagara and ontario, but leaving vancouver felt like I was ripping my own heart from my chest. it still does. of course, a large part of it is that I’m feeling absolutely heartbroken over leaving martin. had circumstances been different, I don’t think I would have made the choice to move back to ontario, even temporarily. but sometimes you have to do what you don’t want to do, for your own health and well-being.

we made it out of vancouver, with tears in my eyes (and many more along the way), and stopped in hope for a club sandwich at the restaurant next to the husky gas station that martin recommended.

the weather was cloudy, misty, and intermittently rainy along the way. we drove up the coquihalla through kamloops, and eventually saw our first “real” mountain…

I don’t have too many photos along the highway through that section, as I slept through a lot of it. I’m not a big fan of the coquihalla, and I had MAYBE a grand total of 20 hours of sleep that week so far, so it was a good time to catch some z’s. I eventually woke up and started enjoying the ride. we were now on our way up into the roger’s pass area. here we are going through a snow shed…

and here’s our quick stop in rogers pass…

we drove like heck to make it up to golden, and had unfortunately forgotten that the time changes ahead an hour JUST before you get there. so although we would have arrived at a perfectly respectable 9:30pm, it quickly changed to 10:30pm and I was afraid I’d have to do what we had to do a couple of years ago – wake up the hotel manager to let us into our room. luckily, it wasn’t THAT late, so we bunked down pretty quick for the night.

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DAY TWO…

as we were staying at the golden rim motor inn, my usual stop in golden, the next morning we went to their in-house restaurant for a yummy breakfast…

and then we were on our way!

it wasn’t long before we passed out of BC and into alberta…

and man, was I upset to see BC behind us. we were now in banff national park, and took the icefields parkway on our way up to jasper national park for some awesome scenery. again, the weather wasn’t fantastic, you could hardly see any mountains at all in most areas, but I was hoping that the weather would be similar to vancouver … rainy and cloudy in the morning, and then cleared up after noon or so.

a cool waterfall along the way…

it wasn’t long at all before we started to see wildlife. first we saw a female elk, and then a black bear…

and soon after that, ANOTHER bear, which I’m pretty sure was a grizzly…

after that guy we stopped taking photos of bears, they seemed to be everywhere. we must have seen half a dozen that day. we also saw lots of bighorn sheep…

although I was really hoping for some mountain goats, as I’ve only seen them in the park once before … but no luck this time.

here we are showing off the icefields parkway…

the mountains up this way looked really cold, and were still covered in snow…

we stopped at the athabasca glacier and took the hike up to the glacier itself. it was COLD, and WINDY, and it even snowed! so here we are looking rather chilly…

and another photo of my feet on the glacier-scraped rocks in front of the glacier…

here’s steve by the roadside on one of our many quick tasha-breaks along the way…

and some more snowy mountains on our way to jasper…

we made it! here’s steve in the town of jasper…

we didn’t stick around in jasper for long. we stopped at a great cafe called mondo cafe, had a quick lunch, stopped for gas, and then were back the way we came, on our way down to banff.

just as I’d hoped, after noon came and went, the weather improved a LOT, so we decided to stop in again at the athabasca glacier, just for kicks, to take another shot of us, this time looking much warmer as we stand in a bit of sunshine, instead of the howling wind and snow…

we continued on to bow lake…

and peyto lake…

saw the last of the wildlife we’d see in banff national park…

and last but not least, a trip through banff national park is never complete without a quick stop at lake louise…

we continued on, and eventually had to say goodbye to the mountains, which was hard. I love the mountains, I think that between the ocean and the mountains, that’s what makes BC so beautiful. knowing I won’t see them again for a while is tough now that I’ve gotten used to seeing them every day for the last four years!

I think that since we were a bit bummed from the loss of mountains, it was a pretty quiet drive though the next hour on to calgary. neither one of us is a huge fan of calgary, so we weren’t really looking forward to it the way we’d been looking forward to driving through the mountains.

we made our stop for the night in calgary. we had anticipated an extremely low end accommodation for the night, as all of the reviews online had been quite poor, with one quote saying “I wish there was a rating below poor so I could adequately describe this hotel”, which was not encouraging. but it turned out to be not half bad, and we didn’t see any of the blood stained walls described in the reviews.

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DAY THREE…

up and at ‘em early, we’ve got a big day ahead of us!

we drive through calgary…

and out into the prairie land…

on our way (excitedly) to the badlands! more specifically, we’re headed for drumheller…

where dana is going to spend some time in the tyrell dinosaur museum, and tasha and I are going to take a hike through the badlands…

here we go on our hike, we had tons of fun, tasha really enjoyed getting out of the car and going for a good long hike…

(hoodoos)

(chunk of petrified tree trunk)

after that, I had the misfortune of crossing paths with a HUGE dinosaur, and had to make a run for it…

and then we headed on our way. the prairies are a little boring – not as bad as people make them out to be – but being a passanger all day long means I’ve got a lot of time on my hands to take photos, so here are dana and I driving along…

and me enjoying the scenery out my window…

the first thing I noticed after leaving drunheller, were the prairie skies. they’re beautiful!

as we drive along…

…we see a wide selection of what I like to call prairie architecture…

we eagerly anticipated each city and town sign that came along, because sometimes they turn out to be real gems – such as this one for medicine hat. wow, now that’s a tagline!…

(we eat lots of beans…)

and before you know it, we’ve left alberta and are on to my favourite prairie province, saskatchewan!…

and quickly come across another awesome town sign. I love this one because of what it’s not expressly saying about the rest of us and our choice of the cities we live in…

we’ve hit moosejaw – it’s not much further now…

here we are, we’ve made it! as I like to say … “show us your regina!” …

we lucked out in regina, not only is it a great city, but we got an AWESOME hotel room. check out tasha looking all cosmopolitan in a REAL hotel room…

dana grabbed us some chinese takeout, but I ended up just eating the fortune cookie, which had a rather overly-practical message…

I went to the window to check out our view, and realized that all the film trucks we’d passed on our way into the hotel were completely lining the street right outside our window. we were to discover later that not only were the trucks right outside our window, but they were actively filming on our floor, just a couple of rooms down the hall from ours! we had to navigate the film crew in the morning as they were filming to try to get our stuff out, and everyone wanted to stop and pet tasha.

rolling, rolling!

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DAY FOUR…

I was a bit sad to leave regina, I wish I’d had more time to explore the city. it looks pretty interesting from what I saw. but as usual, we were up early and on our way…

and it was off through the prairies once again…

(potash lake)

we headed into a bit of a rainstorm, which resulted in a great rainbow over saskatchewan…

we stopped at dairy queen for lunch (yeah that’s right, ice cream for lunch!) and I noticed these flags in the parking lot…

here is dana’s perfectly respectable cone…

and my ridiculous need for sugar…

and we’re off again! we were actually going faster along the highway than the trains…

eventually we hit manitoba…

which we unfortunately haven’t really been looking forward to. we both remember manitoba from the last cross-country road trip, and it was not our favourite province. it’s rather boring really, there aren’t many little towns along the highway, and really not much to look at. most people think saskatchewan must be the most unappealing province to drive through, but we both vote for manitoba to take that prize, hands down…

thank goodness for brandon, to throw a little something interesting in there to look at…

although on the eastern side of winterpeg, manitoba does have the longitudinal center of canada…

and that’s pretty cool.

dana couldn’t wait to get into ontario, and it wasn’t long until we recognized the tourist information centre…

and the fabulously old school welcome to ontario sign…

and that began our drive through ontario…

and into kenora for the night…

we got into kenora at a decent time, about 6 or 7pm, so we headed out for a real dinner at boston pizza, the exact same place we had dinner on our way through to BC four years ago, and after dinner I decided to go down to the pool for a quick swim (without waiting a half an hour – gasp!) and a few minutes in the hot tub. later I had a nice chat with martin, and didn’t end up getting to bed until quite late.

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DAY FIVE…

up again bright an early, grabbed some continental breakfast (read: a bagel), and were on our way again. we caught sight of husky the muskie this time around, we had completely missed him the last time we were in kenora, so that was exciting…

and then we were off on another day’s drive, this time through ontario…

here’s a quick shot of dryden…

and a white-tailed deer…

stopping in little towns along the way every hour or so, so tasha could take lots of pee breaks and stretch her paws…

we made it to kakabeka falls just north of thunder bay…

and had dinner at the east side mario’s in thunder bay as we passed through…

it was looking like we were going to have a long day ahead of us still, so we motored on through the rossport area…

on our way to marathon for the night…

we finally got to our motel in marathon pretty late, about 8:30 or 9pm, so we hit the hay not too long after we got there, we’ve still got 2 more days to go!

(bye vancouver. I’ll miss you and can’t wait to visit as soon as possible.)

monday.

today we’re moving on to mostly the interior of the house. although things are still a mess, as we continue unpacking and putting things away and organizing, which feels like it’ll never end.

but here are an assorment of photos to give you a sense of how the decorating is going. these are the colour schemes we’re using around the house…

and some miscellaneous photos around the house…

(new hydrangea beside trimmed back lilac bush)

our evening of fine dining – welland style – corn on the cob…

kraft dinner…

and bbq’d weiners, all classed up with a glass of red wine…

(laaaaadies???)

can I have some of that too? pleeeeeeeeease??? I’m sitting all pretty and everything…

things are starting to get into a routine, and we’ve unpacked a lot of boxes in the last week, so we’re almost at a point where we won’t have to feel ashamed if someone comes over.

I’ve started trying to run again. I went for a run last wednesday, hurt thursday and friday, then ran again saturday, and went for a long walk-with-purpose through the countryside yesterday. and now as soon as I’m done this entry I’m going to strap on my shoes and go for another run. I’d love to get into a routine of either running or walking every day, as long as I can stay on the wagoon and not get deterred by the cold and crappy weather that will get here eventually. although this week has been nice and sunny, no complaints.

nice and sunny enough to still spend a lot of our time outside. cleaning up dog poop for example…

or just hanging out…

somehow, I managed to get a family doctor here in ontario with my BC care card. I’m going to head to st. catharines to apply for a health card this friday on my day off.

I also finally had to (begrudgingly) apply for my onterrible driver’s licence, get my 5 month old car safetied, and get my new licence plates. which means I have to say goodbye to “beautiful british columbia”. what a shame…

so we’ll end on a happy note with a pretty flower photo to make me feel better…

and this coming weekend, being thanksgiving, martin and I and the pooches will be taking a road trip to ktown to visit the folks. although is it just me, or are the trees really late in changing colour? I remember being lucky if half the leaves were still on the trees by the time thanksgiving day came around.

Thursday.

Happy Birthday to me. Oh goody, another year older. Yeah.

So I woke up this morning to … nuh-huh … another item of mine being used as a pillow …

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I spent the day in the office, statisticizing the heck out of that data!
(and that’s a praying mantis on my computer screen … cool)

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Belinda came and met me at my office after work and we went shopping for a bit. You won’t believe it, but I bought PINK pants. That’s right … pink. I don’t know what came over me, it was like I had an attack of being a girl or something.

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We made our way down to Gastown and had a yummy dinner and some red wine at a nice indian food place … I haven’t had real indian food in a while, so it was a treat. Mmmmm … garlic naan.

We then made our way to Canada Place and decided to see the Imax 3D underwater movie … narrated by Johnny Depp, which I found funny because I’d told some of you I was going to spend my birthday with Johnny Depp by watching Pirates of the Carribean, and so it was quite amusing that although we decided not to go see that movie, I still ended up spending by birthday with Johnny Depp! … sigh …

So here we are in our incredibly flattering eyewear for the movie …

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After the movie we walked around Canada Place at night, taking photos because it was so pretty. That’s Belinda in the photo below.

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These photos all turned out quite well, I may have to get some of them blown up to put in the apartment.

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They decided that because of the success of the orcas a couple of summers ago, that they’d give the same idea a try with grizzly bears, so Belinda decided to pose with the one with the underwater scenes on it, seeing as we’d just watched the underwater movie …

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More nice night shots downtown …

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My office …

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We made our way through downtown and eventually to Robson Street, where we stopped for a treat, and I had a toffee nut steamed milk to top off the evening, then caught the bus back home. A nice relaxing but fun evening.

Tomorrow (Friday) I have the day off, although the weather is still iffy, it’s been chilly, overcast, and sometimes rainy all week. Thankfully the weekend will be nicer, but I’d be super happy if it cleared up for tomorrow.

Although tonight I went to the art supply store and bought nearly $100 bucks worth of oil paints, supplies and canvases, so even if tomorrows weather sucks, I’ll still have something fun to do.

Thanks for the birthday wishes … but now this old lady needs to get some sleep …

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