Skool Disco

It was Skool Disco in the Officer's Mess last night, so I thought I'd share a few photos with you. Just to clear up any confusion, Skool Disco is a school themed fancy dress night for the adults and absolutely nothing to do with any real school!

Jim mail-ordered a fantastic fat schoolgirl outfit from the States which went down very well and I wore my eBay outfit that I mail ordered whilst I was in the Falklands.

Our supper was a hot buffet of sausages, Cornish pasties, battered fish, chips, scotch eggs and veg followed by rice pudding and syrup sponge and custard!

The Lincolnshire sausages we had are made by a local butcher to an English recipe. One of the British guys here has a nice little enterprise importing the spices and rusk and selling the end product on to the staff at BATUS. They are delicious, I'm going to order another 10 packs for the freezer on Monday!

One final treat for you. Jim had to do the "school PE class" - I caught a bit of it on video and I think his fat suit looks even better when caught in motion!

By the way, you'll remember that my neice and nephew made scrapbooks whilst they were in Canada, well, they both got special achievement awards at school for them!

Getting ready for the snow!

The last our our visitors left this morning. My parents have returned to the UK after a 3 week trip round Canada which begun and finished with a few days in Ralston. The weather was very kind to us while they were here, lots of sunshine and temperatures are still in the mid-teens, in fact the forecast for Tuesday is 22c!

But, as everyone keeps telling us, BATUS was under several inches of snow this time last year , so the mild weather will have to end sooner or later!

By the way, we've booked our Christmas trip. We've got a condo at the Falcon Crest in Canmore for 11 nights and we're both hoping to get a place on the 'rec ski' course that BATUS organises during Christmas week.

Quite a few of our friends will be staying nearby and a Christmas party has been organised for Christmas Day evening, so it should beat the UK in the drizzle! :-)

I mentioned before that wild animals coming into the village is supposed to be a good sign that snow is on the way and this week I saw pronghorns (a sort of antelope) in the village on 3 out of 5 mornings when I went to work. One morning there was a pair in our garden!

So despite the current mild weather, we're getting ready for the winter and I've just bought a pair of snow boots (see photo) they cost $50 from Walmart (£12.50 for each foot!) and are guaranteed up to -30c. Don't ask me what happens when it drops below that, I guess we don't go out!

Our first trip to the Rockies

We're back in Ralston after our first trip the Rockies. We were staying a 4 hour drive from home at the Baker Creek chalets near Lake Louise.

We had a wonderful one bedroom log cabin by a river with a wood burning stove, a kitchenette and a loft with two extra beds in it.

Our friends Kirsty & Mark joined us for Friday & Saturday night and on Sunday we met up with my sister and her family who had flown into Vancouver 10 days earlier and were taking a road trip down to meet us in Ralston.

On Saturday we visited the Columbian icefield, a large glacier which you can take a "snobus" trip to. It was -10c on the glacier which gave us our first suggestion of how cold -40c might feel over the winter! I wish I could say it wasn't that bad, but actually it's made me go out and buy some snow boots and a new ski jacket!

The most impressive bit of our visit to the icefield was the buses you travel in, along with their enormous tyres which cost $5,000 each.

Lake Louise itself was stunning, but as we had been told by so many people, it is just the lake and a big hotel and that's it! We got a chance to take some good photos though and had a nice walk round the lake.

We had a wonderful three course Thanksgiving dinner at Baker Creek's bistro on Sunday night. Butternut squash soup, roast turkey and apple cobbler for $40. The bad news is that the chef is moving in 10 days, the good news is he's heading to a restaurant called Crazy Weed in Canmore, so we'll be checking that out when we next visit.

On Monday night my sister and her family cancelled their stay at a hotel in Calgary and moved to a chalet at Baker Creek.

Jim introduced my nephew Archie and neice Millie to toasted marshmallows round a campfire outside our cabin, which they loved - of course!

Back in Ralston, the kids got ticks in all the boxes for the full Canadian experience, by trying out ice skating, making a scrapbook about their trip and getting kitted out in authentic cowboy and cowgirl outfits. 5 year-old Millie had to have everything in pink of course!

26/10 - Thought I'd add a bit of video of Millie and my sister Jane skating in Ralston. Millie looks a lot like her Uncle Jim on the ice!

Fall in Ralston

Our wonderful Canadian summer is slowly coming to an end, the trees have erupted into a spectacular display of colour and the prairie wildlife have started to venture into the village seeking some cover from the increasingly vocal coyotes!

Last night at about 8pm I was stopped in my tracks by two magnificent stags strolling into the village about 100 yards from our house. They were enormous! As the leaves come off the trees there have also been more sightings of Ralston's famous pair of Great Horned Owls. They average 2 foot tall and have been known to help themselves to cats for supper. I'll feel like I've really arrived when I finally see one in the flesh!

Dinosaur Park

About an hour's drive from our home in Ralston is a place called Dinosaur Provinicial Park. We hadn't really realised but it's quite a big deal if you are into fossils, as it's where the most fossils and dinosaurs have ever been found. They've uncovered the remains of something like 6 different species of Dinosaur alone.

Driving up to the park is fascinating as you watch the landscape change first from the flat grasses of the prairie, to green wooded pastures like the UK and then eventually without much warning to something resembling the Grand Canyon!

Unfortunately unless you are into trekking across barren terrain, Dinosaur Park doesn't have much to offer other than a couple of impressive views and one large dinosaur skeleton. They didn't even have a place to get a drink and a sandwich! So it was a little bit of a disappointment, but we did get some good photos which we thought we'd share with you!

Skate School

Every night this week I'm attending the Ralston Devils skate school. Ice hockey is a massive sport in Canada and there are several teams who play every seaeson at BATUS. The Ralston Devils isthe ladies team.

Anyone can have a go at joining the team and most of us who took to the ice on Monday were complete novices. This week is all about learning how to skate, which for a lot of people means just learning how to stay upright! Fortunately you wear so much padding, falling over doesn't hurt!

Talking of which, I've got so much kit on you'd be forgiven for not recognising me in these photos! I'm the one with the stripey socks on!

Skate school starts tonight!

Although we are still enjoying a hot Canadian summer, this week sees the start of the ice hockey season. I've signed up to join the Ralston Devils and having spent much of last week buying and borrowing the necessary equipment, tonight we'll be hitting the ice for the first time.

Every evening this week we'll be attending skate school, then at the end of the month (once we've stopped falling over!) we'll all be going to hockey school.

It's fair to say that ice hockey gear is not the most attractive of outfits and I feel obliged to point out I have not put on 6 stone since I arrived, there is a normal size me under all that padding!