the adventure begins

Welcome to Ross and Angie’s update on their Adventure’s in The Great Canadian Outback.

I suppose the best place to begin is right at the beginning. So there we were two against 10 000 … sorry that is the wrong adventure. So there we were preparing to board my first, our first flight out of Johannesburg and into the great unknown. For those who don’t know this was to be my maiden voyage from South Africa whilst my darling wife has been out and about for a many a moons to many worldly destinations.

But enough of that rambling on and on and on… so we boarded the Lufthansa flight from Jozi to Frankfurt (a sweet 10 hour flight) eagerly awaiting the loads of tv shows and movies we could watch on this really long flight. Guess what!!! We had the unfortunate time of only being able to watch the movie of the flight which was called The Women. There are no men in this lame movie – made the 10 hour flight seem so long… Frankfurt was CCCCCccccooooollllllllddddd. We did the whole compare and contrast prices with the exchange rate and it was cheaper in Frankfurt than in SA. Although we have found that food and drinks are pretty pricy (EVERYWHERE). It was a short delay before we kept on moving leaving Frankfurt for our desired destination of Calgary Canada. I was so relieved when we boarded our new flight and had individual screens and so many choices of what to watch – the dream had finally come true. But that is just the flight details so I think its time to get to the juicier details of our experiences thus far.

Calgary, like Joburg in city looks yet probably only a blip on a radar screen if by comparison. They only just reached 1 million inhabitants and were very proud to share that stat with us. Meeting Trace’s aunt and uncle was a wonderful experience as Doug and Elmarie Course and their two boys Kevin and Michael opened up their house to us strangers and welcomed us in to make a mess and cause a little bit of chaos in their lives. It turned out that they were fairly busy that week we arrived but it meant we could get on our explorer shoes and discover Calgary for ourselves which is half the fun. Of course, Calgary has a new bus and train system designed for easy access and roaming around downtown Calgary and from the south west point where we were staying with the Course family.

So we left for our first exploring of Calgary on Wednesday morning only to miss the bus by probably 2 minutes which resulted in us walking down to the train station. Not a bad experience as we got our trudge on in and around the snow which was still quite thick even though they were experiencing warm weather (-3C). The reason for the warmer climate which we were not expecting was that in Calgary they get Chinook winds. Now for the weather experts amongst our readers and those who really enjoy weather talk, a Chinook wind is a warmer wind which blows through middle and lower Alberta changing the -20C weather to a more modest and very pleasant -3C weather. So for traveling SA peops who left sunny SA at around 25C, the warmer and closer to 0C we can get we would take it. The scary thing walking was the ice and how slippery the surface got even with great gripping shoes like ours weren’t from sunny SA. And as I usually do, who was the first one to test how cold snow and ice really feels. You guessed right, it was me as I respectfully flew off my feet right down onto my backside showing all the grace and composure of a really huge wrestler taking down his opponent. Eventually we made it on the train only to find out that we had not validated our train passes for that trip. Do you wish to know how we found out our passes were not valid – this I must mention probably speaks loads of how Ang and my luck has been going and changing since our run in with the Kruger road hog – we were cautioned but not fined luckily by a Peace officer who climbed on the train 2 stops after we got on. Timing definetly is everything, had we caught the bus we wouldn’t have had any problems and had someone on the train station been helpful enough we could’ve avoided this crazy episode but we learnt very quickly how the whole system works. Thankfully the officer heard or saw we were from out of Canada and graciously gave us a warning and not a fine of $150.

We rode the train through to city centre before crossing over and heading through to the Calgary zoo. The zoo looked magnificent and it wasn’t too chilly as we walked that zoo solid taking photos of every single animal till our batteries ran dead. Oh ja I forgot, we didn’t remember to pack spare batteries so here we are experiencing one of Calgary’s highlights and our camera is dead with tons of wild animals to photograph in their classic poses. Thankfully I have a genius for a wife and we were lucky enough to find a store inside which had batteries and our escapade could continue. To preview these and many more pics taken, please visit our facebook pages and for those who are unfortunately not our friends there, you can still check out the pics. Next installment coming soon from Ross and Angie’s adventure to the great Canadian outback.