Holiday update

The latest from Canada...

We’ve been in Canada a week now and it’s been quite a week. Such a beautiful country and so far lovely people. Everything appears so large here - motor vehicles, houses, shops... Nicely relaxed atmosphere.

We were driving back from the biggest shopping centre I’ve ever been to yesterday. It has an ice rink, a swimming pool with slides and wave generators, and a replica Christopher Columbus ship in the centre of it. In contrast to the other shopping areas we had been to this one was well attended and quite honestly good to visit but better to leave.

My other half' sister-in-law and brother live quite close to a couple of parks in which the kids have free rein. I went with everyone else to one of these and was pleasantly surprised at how clean and well kept it was. I was informed that this was the norm here.

We also took a drive out to one of the many cowboy retail outlets out in the farming area of St. Albert. It was brilliant to see the change to the surrounding areas from urban to rural farming. There were quite a few oil drills dotted around the area. Apparently there is as much oil here in Alberta as there is in the UAE which up until fairly recently was unexplored. The ranches which we also saw were on our driving trip were great as they reminded me of the many ranches shown on the various wild west movies I had watched as a child.

We parked up outside the cowboy clothing, tack and accessories shop. They’re a popular chain store up here in Canada. They had everything you could ask for to be a fully outfitted cowboy/girl. We left the shop some time later armed with boots, shirts, jeans, belts and sheriff badge.

Ooh, I nearly forgot, Dick took us to see an antique high performance car lot. It was closed at the time but I managed to get a couple of photos of the cars they had on sale there.

We then made our way to Wabamun lake after this. The day was beautiful and I fully expected the area to be crowded with visitors but no, not at all. There were a small handful of boating enthusiasts but otherwise it was quiet. I briefly chatted with a lady who had boat there with her husband. She was married to a German chap and lived just outside Edmonton. She was talking about the cost of living and how she felt it was so very expensive here in Alberta in comparison to that of her German in-laws. I just reminded her that the quality of life and the opportunities available in Canada were a lot higher than those in Europe. But she just didn’t appear to see this. We’re never happy with what we have.