christmas_news_2009.pdf

As mentioned in the newsletter, during our holidays in Dawson City, we were filmed by the Canadian Tourism Commission, so here is the video we partly starred in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwODnynTnt8

Funny enough when we got back home to Fort Smith, the same film crew was here filming kayaking on the Slave River, so here is two video that show some local flavour and, our amazing world class rapids.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTE5vEcOwJU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDiQXnKaxUw

And here’s another couple videos from different groups, of the rapids. Really amazing…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD8HfXuWJtY

http://fskayak.webs.com/apps/videos/videos/view/5047477-jacqui-s-slave-river-2009

Slave River 2009 from Jacqui Whitehead on Vimeo.

We have yet to finish totalling how many km’s we covered or how much money we spent. I’ve been waiting to have some down time but we still haven’t finished hanging all the pictures back up on the walls.

However in the meantime I wanted to say that we are all happy to be home safe and sound, and have settle back into the routine of life in Fort Smith, NWT.

Take care for now, The James’

http://weblog.jamesworld.ca/trip-inspiration/

Officially today we have rounded off our trip of eleven months around the world with our return to Edmonton. While we had left home on July 31, 2007 driving South, our first flight segment departed Edmonton on August 9. It’s been completely amazing and I will continue with finishing up a few posts (backdated of course) describing our experiences and visits throughout Western Canada. While we all breathed a little sigh of relief and satisfaction on returning to Oilberta, it is also not with just a little sadness that we conclude our Grand Adventure. Now it’s time to pay off some debts and start saving and planning for our next one.

WAHOO!

The other terrible thing about the Kamloops area was the massive devastation of the pine beatle. Well over three quarters of the area forests were the stark burgundy of dead needles. Worse though, is that with global warming, these pests are moving steadily North and wiping out everything in their path. If that alone isn’t terrible enough, the extreme danger of forest fires sweeping through these heavily populated valleys is an even larger concern by all. I’d have nightmare’s if I lived there for sure! It was also about this time that we finally watched Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Even more ammunition for those afore-mentioned nightmares. It really does seem overwhelming! Until the politicians get out of the back pocket of utility companies and car manufacturers, there seems little hope of genuine development of reasonable alternatives. Sadly we just all need to choke it back, and take a hit to the economy before any sort of reasonable progress can be made. Time will tell…

After a great night in Kamloops we headed back South to Kelowna. We were staying at Jeff & Jo’s house while they were away, but managed to spend the afternoon and supper with my youngest Aunt, Reola. She had a great condo with a pool that the kids thoroughly enjoyed, and even better was the fact that her son was visiting. I hadn’t seen him since before we had moved North, so we all had a great visit catching up. I also finished showing her and Josh how to manage their domain registration and hosting accounts. She had designed most of her own web page for a commercial project and was getting supremely hosed by a local company who were maintaining it to the tune of about $1,200! That was the equivalent of about $90/year that I set her up with, and two hours (absolute tops) of work they had done setting up and transferring files. Crazy what people will stoop to get away with if the poor customer doesn’t know any better.

That night we went the Artiss’ home and marveled at the incredible garage they have. All the toys a guy could ever want, and then some. Wow! They showed up in the gas guzzling behemoth that is their cozy but older motorhome the next afternoon and we had a wonderful night visiting together. We even shared another bottle of the Strawberry chocolate wine in our cross Canada efforts of exposing everyone possible to Rush Creek Wines in Southern Ontario. This proved very “fruitful” (pun intended of course) for rush Creek as Jeff & Jo and another couple of friends later ordered a few dozen bottles. That’s pretty amazing, I figured, coming from residents of the Okanagan Valley.

The next day we headed back to Kamloops for another few nights, but this time with Uncle Steve and Aunt Helena, (my dad’s youngest brother). We had stayed with them our last time through the area several years previously and it was also great to catch up. They were empty nesters now, with a big house high in the hills and a very “sportly” equipped garage. We did even more relaxing and visiting while Auntie Helena cooked a great lasagna. It was naturally fabulous but Luke was particularly thrilled as he hadn’t had any in quite a while. Friends of ours from Smith, the Gauthiers, had planned on staying the same two nights in Kelowna on their way South to Vanc. Island for their family vacation. With a huge landslide on one highway, they were extensively delayed, but still showed up for some re-heated lasagna before heading to their hotel. I had booked a mine tour for the eight of us the next day at Highland Valley Copper pretty early so we crashed shortly after.

The hour drive out showed valley after valley of more dead coniferous forests. Still an incredibly sad sight. Speaking of raping and pillaging the earth, the mine was one of the largest open pit operations in Canada. Very incredible to see. There were a few good photo-ops and the eight of us were the only ones on the tour. After a great day wandering around Kelowna we headed East to Cowtown (and, sadly, even closer to home) the next morning.

While we had the option to stay two nights in Rossland, we decided to continue on to Vancouver Island and try and spend the night with parents of some other neighbors of ours from Fort Smith. The (only slightly) senior Keizers come up to Smith once a year it seems and we have come to know them fairly well. They have a spectacularly large house (for empty nester’s that is) just outside of Victoria in Esquimalt. Deer and all sorts of other wildlife frequent their backyard forest which backs on to the Canadian navy base. The next morning after wolfing down some huge homemade waffles, we hit the road for the couple hour trip to Ladysmith, just outside of Nanaimo.

While there were several possible tourist stops along the way, we were only up for one viewing point balcony overlooking the inside coast. It was higher up and gave a rather nice view of the coastline and all the stunningly green islands. We quickly concluded that the pine beetle can’t swim in salt water… There were fruit stands galore on the side of the highway, and we made it to Ladysmith in quick time without too many stops. We settled in for lunch with Dad & Janet after some hugs all around. It was nice to spend a few days relaxing, visiting and just generally catching up. We arranged an evening picnic in a Nanaimo park to visit with any James relatives on the Island who could join us. That was a blast, and after even more hugs all around we sat and ate, and even tossed the frisbee around a bit. It was wonderful seeing so many James relatives that we hadn’t talked to in several years (since the last time we came out to the island, now that I think about it; Hmmmm…) and swapping stories (all true!) about Grandpa James. We had originally planned on touring the island a bit and hoped to go to the West Coast of the Island and up North a ways past Campbell River a bit. Due to time these extra options went the way of the dodo, a visit to crazy Horse and a “leisurely trip across the country”. Perhaps next time, in a few years, once these bills are paid WAY down.

We departed after less than a week on Vancouver Island, heading North towards Kamloops & Kelowna. We didn’t even bother stopping in Vancouver at all, and just trucked on through. Vancouver traffic is CRAZY! But still not as bad as Montreal or Toronto I sadly have to admit, (Or Hanoi, Vietnam for that matter). Still, I have no idea how people can possibly live in such concrete jungle conditions…

So I can now finally say that 9,600 KM later, we have crossed 9 provinces (we were in PEI 4 years ago, and lived in what is now Nunavut 96-99) and traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Rick and the kids will still need to go to the Yukon, but I can now officially say I’ve been everywhere in Canada, fulfilling a life long dream.

The next day (a Saturday, for those keeping track…) we continued on to Lethbridge for a surprise meeting with my Dad and his wife Dianne. They had scooped Pete (our pet Jack Russle Terrier) that morning from my Mom’s house and were going to stay the night before heading back home then next day while we continued Westward to Trail BC. It was unfortunate we weren’t able to meet up with them anywhere else in our year of travels, but it was still great finally meeting up with them now. We met in a park where unfortunately the kids recognized Grandpa’s well labeled “Truckers Toybox ” van before even seeing them. Pete was still a pretty good surprise though and their was much joy. After we caught up and enjoyed a good nights rest, it was time to ramble on.

To get to our next stop was an interesting drive all along the Lake Superior shore. Thunder Bay has always had a very Northern “feel” to it. Even though I’ve never been there before, just the way everyone talks about it gives that strong impression. The blackflys in the area also probably help out a bit too with such an allusion. I enjoy confirming these loose assumptions about Thunder Bay with people we meet. Most tend to agree that that is indeed their opinion of Thunder Bay. The interesting part is that Thunder Bay is below the forty-ninth parallel. This means that it is at a lesser latitude (or “height” up the globe from the equator) than all of Western Canada. That’s a pretty wild thought for most people.

The Canadian family we had met up with in Thailand recently moved here, and so we stayed with the Cook’s. We had rented an apartment next to them on Phuket Island with the shared swimming pool. It was pretty cool to to see Phil & Joy again, and our kids immediately set out to the trampoline to join Kyla & Josh working off some energy. Phil had a magnificent roast on the BBQ and we sat around and caught up for the rest of the evening. It turns out that as much as they enjoyed living and working in Thailand, the company there had proved unreliable and so they returned to Canada. The next morning, the kids stayed home from school to fool around with Alex and Luke for a couple of hours while we leisurely packed up. After a huge breakfast we said our goodbyes and departed on to Winterpeg.

The road north through the U.S. was pretty decent and twinned most of the way. With a speed limit of seventy miles per hour, we made pretty good time. The two huge bridges across the Great Lakes Ship transportation routes offered a far reaching view of the vast surrounding area. It is funny to see many odd signs around the world. Twenty miles out of Flint was another good one. It said: PRISON AREA: DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS. Actually, there were no less than four of these signs along that three and a half hour stretch North to the Canadiann border. That sounds like a whole lot of prisons!

Our GPS has been nothing short of reliable. Same with the three previous models we had rented or used in Australia and throughout Europe. We started having problems with it half way up the State of Michigan though. The distance to go was quite a bit out on the GPS compared to the road signs… After scratching our heads for a couple hours and gave up. Then it hit Claudette when she saw a speed limit sign of 70 that everything here (including the distance signs) were labeled in imperial measurements. It turns out that we had forgotten that imperial distances on signs would be smaller numbers than the metric settings in our GPS.

This was our last time going into or through the States for this entire trip. This means that even though Claudette had assured me we could go to Crazy Horse, she never really wanted to. It would have been an extra couple of days, and we were having to cut stays and visits in many other areas so it was only fair for me to have to give this desire up, (along with a stay at my Aunt & Uncles on Vancouver Island and Claudette’s long awaited visit to Euclulet). I was also enormously tempted to try and go through Detroit so we could go to the Motown museum for a few hours. I didn’t even try and bring this up with Claudette, since we were so short on time to get across the country and she has only a passing interest in music. The profound impact of Motown and the many talented singers and bands it represented on modern music is something I would LOVE to have explored. Perhaps another time… Instead we stayed a little North of Windsor and crossed the border their on our way to Flint (Michael Moore’s hometown) and then North.

Just a few hours to the Southwest was Point Pelee National Park. This is a long narrow marsh and sand point stretching out into Lake Erie. It is not only a beautiful spot, but is the most Southern Point in Canada. It is well below the latitude of the North border of the State of California. The most interesting part (to me) is that there used to be over 300 lots with cottages all down the point forty years ago, but Parks Canada bought and moved them all out. We were hoping to wade out on the point a little further South than friends from Smith had two years previously, but the Gods were not with us today. It was a pretty windy day, and the entire point of sand was blown under water, up to where large rocks were placed. It was still a pretty cool experience though and we went swimming a little ways North where the currents weren’t so dangerous.

In the area of Aylmer were tonnes and tonnes of crops. This was previously the area of Canada where about 75% of the tobacco crops were grown before all operations were moved to Mexico a decade ago. Being so far South, it is some of the best growing land available in Canada. Even pretty good for grapes and other fruits. Rush Creek Winery is just a kilometer away from Wayne an Jackie’s place. We had wanted to take a tour, but missed the closing time on our first two nights in the area. Instead we only had the chance to swing by at 9:00 AM on the day we were heading North to Sault St. Marie to continue our journey across Canada. The lady was a little surprised that we couldn’t go through the whole relaxing wine tasting routine, but just wanted to buy some and get going. Tim & Jo had shared a bottle of DECADENCE (an incredible Strawberry Chocolate concoction) with us at the very start of our trip in August when we met up. So we bought a case of that and then twelve assorted bottles of most of their other other types. We’ll slowly throughout the next several months open them and experiment with our taste buds. If any of you are ever within a couple hours drive of London, Ontario, then a visit to the winery is highly recommended. Check it out at: http://www.rushcreekwines.com