Waiting in Seattle

I am in Seattle, waiting, waiting, waiting for a baby to arrive. Alan is in Sydney having a health review - all good news- and planning a trip to Western Australia in August. Zoe is well, but tired - of waiting, but also of the endless round of checks and hospital visits. The weather here has been nice. It's often slow to start to warm up in the mornings, but by about 4 pm, it's quite pleasant. We haven't seen the mountains as clearly as we did the very first weekend we were here in May, but I am sure they are still there. Zoe is hoping the baby will arrive in the next 10 days ( its due on 6 August). I will keep you posted.

Across Canada by train

We left Ottawa at noon on the train on Tuesday and arrived in Vancouver on Saturday, only an hour late. I say "only an hour" as we were 4 hours late into Winnipeg and 7 hours late into Edmonton! I think the time change helped! What a fabulous way to travel though. Both Alan and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The train was very comfortable, the staff all friendly and informative and the meals really nice and huge! As well, the scenery was stunning. I hardly read anything as my eyes kept being drawn to the views outside the window. It's further from Toronto to Vancouver than from Sydney to Perth. Most of its Ontario, which seemed to be thousands of small wooded lakes on either side of the train. I looked in vain for a moose, but did see deer, beavers, bison and mountain goats - oh and prairie dogs. Manitoba was rolling hills and canola fields, Saskatchewan flat with silos, and Alberta green grassy fields with undulating hills. Until Edmonton when we started into the Rockies. Actually we were climbing since we left Toronto according to the informative, if not manic, attendant in the observation car. But it was near Jasper that we really got amongst the Rockies and it was hard to tear your eyes away from the windows. Once we crossed the Alberta/ BC border and the continental divide, we followed a river all the way to Vancouver. It started off as tributes, but eventually became the Fraser River. I would absolutely recommend this trip to anyone: it was fantastic.

Ottawa and Canada Day

It was a beautiful day yesterday for Canada Day in Ottawa. Alan and I started early to avoid the crowds on the bike path and were there in time to watch the flag raising ceremony and the changing of the guards. We saw the Governor General arrive with a mounted escort from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and also saw the Prime Ministers cavalcade whizz by in a stream of black cars with tinted windows, so I guess he saw us, rather than us seeing him. We saw the snowbirds perform arial feats in their super sonic jets and parachutes drop from the sky as well as hearing lots of Canadian artists and buskers. We went to a free concert in the evening with Unisong, combined children's choirs from all over Canada accompanied by a wild Cape Breton Island fiddler with her 6 year old daughter dancing a jig. And then we saw the fireworks over Parliament House and the Ottawa River. Aw ! We got home about 11, cycling madly on our bikes to avoid the thousands of walkers after the fireworks. It was a really good day. I forgot to mention we spent a couple of hours in a pub watching Spain win the Euro12 soccer championship. The other night we met with my former flat ate, Pam, who now lives in BC who was visiting friends and relatives over here. We met up here at the RCMP musical ride which was a great spectacular and free at their training grounds. We had a great catch up and then we met for a pancake breakfast on Saturday at her friends house and really had a good time. We hoped to meet up with them yesterday for the fireworks, but it was too much in a big crowd and they were going in a different direction to us afterwards, so it worked better for us to stay on our side of the crowd. We have really enjoyed our visit to Ottawa. It is a very comfortable city and appears to be very livable, certainly staying where we are where it's a simple bike ride into the city on a dedicated bike track along the canal. They say you have to cycle for 30 minutes to work off a beer and I have been making sure I have got the beer, especially seeing it has been nice and hot here! Tomorrow we board the train, heading for Vancouver and we get off on Saturday. Should be good. I am sorry I cannot put photos on the blog from my IPad. You can view them on Picasa.

The past revisited

A couple of days ago, Alan and I visited Fredericton, New Brunswick, where I spent some months of my life in 1974. It was winter and very cold with an unusual amount of snow that year. My memories of that time revolve about drinking lots of beer, snowshoeing in the woods and working at a small rehabilitation centre where I was the only OT. I shared a house with a bunch of other strangers to the city, one of whom we will be visiting in California later this trip. It was a funny place back then and not much seems to have changed. I easily found our old flat, on the ground floor of a run down old house on the riverbank. Apart from a change of color, it looked pretty much the same - in need of TLC and a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Strangely, while looking at the old place, the owner came out and started talking to me. He would love to fix it up better, he told me, but just getting the place to meet current regulations - fire standards etc, had taken about all of his capital. He lived on the top floor and was forced to change the configuration of the flats due to safety standards. My old room, for example, was accessed by the old servants stairs ( very narrow and windy) which are no longer considered safe, so that room now belongs to what was the upstairs flat. I found it hard to remember the downtown area and could not find the pub where I spent so much time, but probably it needed so much spent on it too, and there are new houses along the river there now. The old rehab centre has been incorporated into the new hospital and is no longer in existence. It's still a very pretty city though and the weather was warm and sunny.

Niagara Falls

You all know about Niagara Falls, so I needn't go into descriptions about how much water flows over every minute etc - but I have to say, it's a bloody lot of water - a bloody lot! Of course it's amazing. The falls themselves don't seem to be any different than when I was last here 36 years ago - there's still a bloody lot of water going over every minute - but the built environment has changed enormously. There are now lots of "attractions" to enhance your visit. Those of you on Facebook will have seen that Alan did the "behind the Falls" visit, where he had that corny photograph taken. We both went up Skylon - a tower which does have a fantastic view from the top. We also visited the Whirlpool ( thankfully still free) and then drove down to Niagara on the Lake - an old town which was rebuilt following the war of 1812 - not Napoleon, but the Yanks. It's full of beautiful graceful houses and lovely gardens. Our exchange house in Toronto is actually not in Toronto itself, but in the "greater Toronto area", which means we are an hours drive out of town. It's a newish suburb and we are in a very big house, with a nice garden, so it's very relaxing. Today we will go into Toronto downtown for a bit of a look around. They appear to have a festival like Sydney's Vivid on at the moment.

Exploring Seattle

Alan and I have been doing a bit of exploring this week and have been downtown and also to Pioneer Square and the amazing Smith Tower, the first skyscraper not in New York, built in 1914. You get a pretty good view from up there, but it's been cloudy, so Mt Rainier is still not visible, although we did see it briefly one morning last week. Since last weekend, we have hardly even seen the Olympic Mountains. We haven't been up the famous Space Needle as we are waiting for a clearer day. Today we went on 'the Duck', a 1942 army duck which does a land and water tour of Seattle. Zoeluma had been looking forward to it and we all ended up having a lot of fun in an American sort of way - ie lots of 'woo-hoos' and shouts and waving to strangers, and singing loudly to songs like 'Hit the road Jack' and 'All shook up' but it was all fun. We did learn a lot about Seattle and its history and its famous residents like Bill Gates, Ben Boeing, Starbucks owners and many movie producers and directors. After a hotdog from a street stand for lunch, Alan and I went to the Dale Chihuly Glass Garden, a new art installation by this famous glass artist. It was just fantastic and we were so impressed. Yesterday we went to the Seattle Art Museum and saw among other things, an excellent exhibition of Australain Aboriginal Art. We are off the Canada on Wednesday.

The Olympic Peninsula

It was a long weekend this weekend, being Memorial Day on Monday, so like half of Seattle, we headed out of town. Zoe had found us a very cute cottage in the woods neat Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula, a short ferry ride from downtown Seattle. We had to wait an hour for the ferry, but it was worth it. The weather was perfect and we had a wonderful view of the Olympic Range, but Mt Ranier was still playing coy. We enjoyed the drive from Bainbridge to Port Angeles, stopping at a classic 50s style diner on the way for a milk shake. We liked it so much we went back for lunch on Monday! We had planned to drive to Forks on Sunday (Twilight fans will know all about Forks) but decided it was too far after our day in the car on Saturday and opted for the closer Crescent Lake instead. It was lovely and we had coffee in the 1919 Lodge built before it was a National Park. I don't know if it was where he shot the bear cub, but Teddy Roosevelt shot deer here. The woods near our cottage were filled with squirrels, chipmunks, little mice and there were fallow deer and even a reindeer near the main house. We saw bald eagles! It was a beautiful weekend. We cunningly missed the turnoff for the ferry and avoided the crowds by driving the long way home via Tacoma. It was a lovely Memorial Day weekend.