We spent a little time in Seattle to visit Rachel, the world's largest piggy bank, a bronze statue in the Pike's Place Market, and we also stopped by a coffee shop on Battery Street where some of my friends left me a gift about a month ago when they were driving across America-- a lei, hiding behind a Robert Browning book. Hilarious! Like we said, we had dinner with Justin Anderson, who seems to be doing well out in Seattle. Our flights home were all right. Flying in Las Vegas in the middle of the night was pretty cool. Unlike most city airports where the lights just peter out over the suburbs, the lights ended abruptly at the edge of the city where it met the desert. Kind of weird. Katie's parents picked us up from Newark early this morning. We're pretty tired, but hopefully we'll get the rest of our photos up for you to see soon, and recap a few of our last awesome moments. Amazing trip with amazing ladies!

Just wanted to let you know that we have safely arrived in Vancouver! We already dig the place and are looking forward to tomorrow's adventures. A few photos are being posted from the travels and from the sunset on Jericho Beach, which is where our last hostel is.

Tree: Bigleaf Maple
Beers: Russell Cream Ale, Russell Honey Blonde

We wandered around Vancouver today. I love this city! There are a lot of cool unique districts, it's clean, there's a lot of bike paths and parks and whatnot, basically encouraging people to get out and do things.

We also checked out the Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver. It's pretty enormous and sweet and there's a lot of trees, but I hung out with Katie, who couldn't cross the bridge on crutches. We hung out with some crazy wooden statues and got our hands stamped for visiting various children's stations...

The girls went along with my intense desire to have dinner at a microbrewery, so we ended up at Yaletown Brewery. Beers of the day: Hill's Special Wheat and Red Trucker Ale. We spent some time at Sunset Beach Park this evening, which is exactly what it sounds like, on the English Bay. It was really pretty and a relaxing way to say goodbye to this awesome country. Can't believe we're heading home tomorrow!

Revelling!

We have arrived in Revelstoke, British Columbia, although we almost didn't make it because we were so awestruck by the beautiful things we saw along the Icefields Parkway in Banff and Glacier National Park this afternoon that we probably could have stayed there forever staring.
http://s276.photobucket.com/albums/kk14/JackCanada/day%2012/

Trees include Lodgepole Pines (slender variety!), Black Spruce
Beers include Mount Begbie (a Revelstoke brew) Pale Ale, Kolsch and Cream Ale, Alexander Keith's Red Amber (again from Nova Scotia), and Sleeman's Honey Brown (from Guelph, Ontario). Note to parents: Amanda and I did not have five beers each. The bartender was kind enough to pour us a bit of each to taste before ordering.

Tonight we're in a Same Sun hostel. I dig the name, because we're all under the same sun. Of course, that sun sets really late up here... the past few nights it's been light till nearly 10. We got another hour today when we got to British Columbia, so we weren't as far went in the time zone, but still. We're more than 5000 kilometers from home and we're having a great time!

Banff is lame, so we're not posting any photos.




JUST KIDDING!!! Photos may not do this place justice, but we'll post a gaggle of them over the course of the evening nonetheless.
http://s276.photobucket.com/albums/kk14/JackCanada/day%2011/

(Also because we are all concerned that my dear friend Justin Doyle will attack us if we don't.)

Trees for the day: Western Red Cedar, Water Birch
Beers for the day: Alexander Keith's IPA from Nova Scotia (at happy hour price!) (and very good, and I'm not usually a fan of beers that you can see through), Show-something or Showgirl or something -shine from Calgary (which wasn't great, surprise surprise Calgary)

Today was beautiful.

Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff

Tomorrow we go to Banff!

Today's drive brought all sorts of surprises, which was good because it was another long one (between 7 and 8 hours somewhere). Amanda and I are still doing just fine with driving, switching off as needed. We expected Alberta to follow Manitoba and Saskatchewan and basically continue the flatness till we got to the Rockies. We were still awestruck by the beauty of it, possibly due to the vastness and vividness of the colors-- the greens and beiges of the fields, the bright blue sky (alternating with the deep blue-grey apocalypse style clouds and some sweet lightning off in the distance). Our ears are telling us that we're definitely not at sea level anymore, pop pop pop pop pop. At one point, we went up a hill and around a curve and were suddenly in this gorgeous hilly area.

Other highlights of the drive included finding another Sibbald-- this time an itty bitty town just over the border into Alberta, and stopping for lunch in Fiske, Alberta, another itty bitty town that had a random gazebo in an empty lot. We saw an older man going for a stroll, and we're pretty sure he told the other twelve citizens of the town that some strange girls were having a picnic, because for being only a pair of blocks big, a lot of cars sure went past. Everyone waved though. Everyone's so nice here.

And then we got to Calgary, which probably wasn't going to win favorite city of the trip, but an emo twelve year old skater boy wearing skinny girl jeans flipped me off in an already psychotically stressful parking lot, so I have decided that Calgary is of no use to me other than being the layover on the way to BANFF!

Oops, we were too busy being old ladies to post last night

Today (yesterday) we discovered the awesomeness of Jamie's eyesight. She was the first one to spot a 30 foot moose, annnd the first one to spot the prairie. We went to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and found that it should be easy to find a 30 foot moose, but it wasn't. As a side note, 75 year old motorcycle men from BC cannot take legit pictures of people AND a 30 foot moose. See pictures for details.

We discovered that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have not actually been on horseback for 50 years. Also, it is the USA's fault that the Mountees were created and everyone hates American whiskey traders. Colleen would like to add that it was not her people's fault, but only Katie's. Colleen and Amanda became Mountees in the child-sized costumes, although it may have cut off their breathing. Katie and Jamie combined make one Mountee. We watched a troop of RCMP doing drill practice which was sweet, and then we watched 1st graders do it which was creepy.

Then we drove to Saskatoon, and it was really flat with some random hills thrown in for kicks. We found that Saskatoon's downtown is only a block, despite the fact that it's Saskatchewan's largest city. Across from the hotel was a sandwich place called Badass Jack's, so of course we had to eat dinner there. When we enter the hotel, we found an alternate universe/igloo/hobbit hole on the second floor. Sadly, the rest of the hallway to the room did not match that. We went on a mini pub crawl through Saskatoon for Amanda's birthday and sampled some more Canadian beers. Great Western is brewed in Saskatoon, Rickard's White from P.E.I., and Grasshopper from Calgary (our next stop). Jamie and Amanda experienced the coldest temperatures ever when we went into the liquor store to find the Grasshopper, but they survived without frostbite.

After we finished the beer and uploaded some photos, we passed out because we are all secretly 80 years old.

Now we're on our way to Calgary, stopping at Beaver Conservation Area before we leave Saskatoon. This was a group effort, p.s., which is why it's so random. Amanda thanks everyone for the birthday wishes, and thanks to Mom Earp for the tinnybopper card!

We <3 Amanda!

IT IS AMANDA'S 22ND BIRTHDAY AND WE ARE EXCITED!!!

Oh, and we're safely in Saskatoon and we saw Royal Mounties, a 30 foot moose statue, and some prairie dogs today. Yay!

We have skipped time zones twice now and have a third one to go in a few days, so please know that I'm not really still awake at 2.07AM. That's just preposterous.

checklists and bison and drumlins, oh my!

Slowly but surely uploading photos... today is day eight already!

When I was in high school, a bunch of us from youth group were at a diner, probably after forcing our youth pastor to bring us to a Presbytery meeting or something. I probably made some offhanded comment about how my goal in life was to break 200,000 miles in the car I drove at the time (a Nissan Stanza which died at nearly 204,000 during my junior year of college) and then I could die happy. Well, Wayne, our youth pastor, did not find that acceptable and wrote a list of things I needed to do before I died on the back of the diner placemat, including but not limited to: live outside of NJ for more than a year (check), kiss a prairie dog (check), and travel to Saskatchewan... CHECK! Another item on the list was "drive on the edge", very unspecific, but I'm pretty sure I've done that in the past week: the edge of the Great Lakes, the edge of America, the edge of Canada, the edge of FLAT, FLAT, FLAT LAND.

But we got to see some bison, and that rocked! Actually, I've enjoyed the flat drive. It's flat. It's very different from the flat I come from, living next to the ocean. It's flat and grassy. And flat. But it's pretty, and I manage to find random minor glacial landforms and other geographic phenomena. Society might call me nerdtastic. Society would be absolutely correct.

Tomorrow we're going to check out the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Heritage Center and carry on to Saskatoon via Moose Jaw. Life is awesome.

By the way, JACK Parental Units, we are incredibly amused by the plethora of ways you have decided to sign your comments besides "Mom" and "Dad" since there's four of each of you. Keep up the good work.

Hey Fozzie, where've we gone?

Today we drove from Winnipeg to Saskatoon. As mentioned, Winnipeg seemed oddly empty. We figured that's because we arrived on a Sunday evening, but here we are, Monday morning, and it still seems pretty empty. Amanda and I walked around the city a little bit while Jamie and Katie enjoyed sleeping in a little bit. We checked out the hotel's water slide before leaving for the open prairie.

Manitoba is beautiful in its vastness. Nothing but highway, fields, and sky stretching in every direction. We stopped for lunch in a place called White Horse, which featured a statue of a white horse, something about young lovers being killed instead of living happily ever after, the horse was a gift somewhere in there. At lunch we discovered that the oranges that caused us so much trouble at International Falls? One orange hid in the bottom of our bag and made it back through customs and into Canada again!

We have arrived safely in Saskatchewan. Our hostel for the night here in Regina is a really lovely old house. We're the only girls in the building so we have an enormous room to ourselves!

borderline ridiculous

This update will hopefully be posted from the Marlborough Hotel, whose wireless internet is kind of misbehaving. I'm updating tonight because everyone else slept like toddlers in the car for our ridiculously long drive today. This morning we decided to change today's route a little bit, leaving Ontario for Manitoba via Northern Minnesota so we could make Fathers' Day phonecalls at domestic prices, get cheaper gas (the liter to gallon conversion leaves us around $6.50 a gallon in Canada), and check our International Falls. It looked as though it would add a little over an hour to today's trip, but since we gained an hour when changing time zones, it was negligible due to TIME TRAVEL!

International Falls is a misnomer. The Ontario side is called Fort Frances, another papermill town, and it was kind of difficult to find the bridge to Minnesota. The "falls" were, as best we could tell, some rapids running under the bitty little bridge we crossed that had natural gas pipelines and a shared lane for busses, trains, and trucks. We survived that, and then there was customs. We were sent to see the Agricultural Dude because we had a small bag of baby carrots (American), a bag of grapes that were going bad that we'd meant to get rid of (Mexican), and two oranges from the last hotel's continental breakfast... all picked up in Canada. Well, he ok'd our grapes, but we kind of didn't want them back, and he ok'd the carrots because they were American, but he claimed our oranges couldn't be transported because they weren't in a box or bag... and then he quarantined those to his jacket pocket. Snacktime for the USDA Border Patrol!

A note to any Mary Washington Geographers who may be reading-- I drove past a sign for Bemidji today! It was kind of several hours out of the way and I already felt bad enough for talking my friends into driving through Minnesota and adding time to our trip... but I pulled over and got a photo. AMAZING. This photo and others will probably not be up till tomorrow because the internet is not sure if it wants to keep working or not this evening.

I drove from lunchtime onward, crossing us back into Canada. We'd gotten rid of our carrots so passed through customs without a problem. The lady asked why we were driving through Canada, and I told her because we thought it was awesome, and she said we were absolutely right. Welcome to Manitoba! It is REALLY flat! And there is roughly nothing within several dozen kilometers of the border. I enjoyed the drive. Everyone else fell asleep till we were pretty much into the city. So far in Winnipeg, we're impressed with the size of the city but how not crowded it feels. Then again, it was Sunday evening when we arrived. We're in a sweet hotel and all rather tired since we feel like it's an hour later than it is.

And now that this is besously long, I'd like to add a post script: Congratulations to our friends Becky and David, who became parents for the first time this weekend! Welcome to the world, Samuel!