Family life in Canada

Funny what you find Googling on a Wednesday afternoon. I just spotted this on the Army website, it's also on youtube. It's a two minute video about life in Ralston and if you watch carefully, you might spot me. You have no idea how off putting it is presenting a show with a video camera trained at you through the glass!

Sausages and second hand shops

As you may recall a couple of weeks ago I inadvertently ended up becoming a sausage salesman! This strange side project came about because BATUS's first sausage entrepreneur left at short notice for a new job in Vancouver and being one of his most loyal customers, he handed over the job of importing the ingredients and selling the sausages to me.

I should add that this is very much a hobby rather than a business, as with each pack selling at $7 each, the profit is negligible. However I do get to play around with expanding the range and most importantly we always have some frozen sausages in the house!

The first two batches, which are now selling under the name of "Great British Banger" are available in Leek & Stilton and original. Next month I think I'll try Somerset Apple and Pork...

In this post I also wanted to mention the wonderful second hand stores in Canada. I have never been a fan of car boot sales or charity shops in the UK, but in Canada it's a whole different game.

We have two huge second hand superstores in Medicine Hat. Value Village is a vast supermarket like building and The Post is a sprawling shop full of inter-connected rooms and hidden corners. Value Village has served us well for fancy dress outfits for the last year as well as the odd surprising homeware gem, where as The Post is a more recent discovery.

The most remarkable thing about these stores is that they sell EVERYTHING. Clothes, electrical goods, furniture, bicycles, glass, china, baskets, bedding, ice skates, toiletries...and it's all washed, packaged up, labelled and priced.

On my last trip to The Post I came away with two cake stands, two Kilner jars, some fabric for quilting and a set of Christmas lights, all for $35. I am particularly chuffed with my heavy vintage glass cake stand and cover that I got for $10. It's had lots of compliments!

Fall road trip

Since my last post we have spent a week on the road with my parents traveling around the US and Canada discovering some fantastic new places and revisiting some wonderful old ones.

On our first day we headed off to the Cypress Hills, south-east of Ralston and close to the US border. Here we discovered a hidden gem, the Cypress Hills Winery, a small family run vineyard in the middle of nowhere which produces such exotic tipples as rhubarb wine, honey mead and Saskatoon berry wine. We had a wonderful lunch of cheese and bread on their patio in the sunshine and bought a few bottles to bring home too. Jim wasn't with us for this leg of the trip as he had only just flown in from the UK, so I think I might be taking him for a return visit quite soon, especially as they stop serving lunch at the end of October!

In the afternoon we drove on to Fort Walsh, which was a mounted police and trading post in the 1880s. It has been rebuilt as it was at the time and we had a guided tour of the site, finding out about the heavy bison coats they used to wear in the winter and the illegal whiskey trade they were sent to control.

Then on to Elkwater for our first night, taking a very scenic unmade road across the park which is only accessible in summer. I'm not sure if it was during this or later journeys that my father cracked the windscreen of his hire car, but his Ford Escape did not make it back to Calgary airport in one piece!

On our second day we drove across the border into the US, stopping at the one horse town of Havre for lunch and then spending the night in a brilliant 'Kamping Kottage' at the KOA campground in Great Falls. Along the way we drove alongside the Missouri river, which begins all the way up this far north and meanders down to St Louis in the south east of the US.

Our third night should have been spent in St Mary on the southern side of Waterton Park, but the hotel screwed up our booking and as we weren't impressed with what we saw anyway, we used their error as an excuse to dump the accommodation and press on to Waterton.

As it turned out this was a great decision, as we ended up having 3 wonderful days in Waterton in tropical temperatures! (It was 27c on October 1st!). Jim and I have visited Waterton in various weathers (remember the deep snow in May?) and have always loved it, but with the colours of autumn, the sunshine and the lack of tourists, it was idyllic. (see photo right)

My parents stayed in a fantastic loft room in the Glacial Suites, whilst we parked the RV up in the town campsite. In a strange twist, it turned out that the huge RV next to us was owned by the in-laws of a bit of a Canadian celebrity, Brad Pattison, the presenter of At The End Of My Leash, a show that Jim and I watch regularly!

Whilst in Waterton I also managed to see my first and second bear. Unbelievably despite having lived in Canada for 14 months, my parents had seen more bears in a 3 week holiday than I'd seen in over a year!

We eventually spotted the bears after pulling the car over at dusk on the Red Rock Canyon and waiting. They were both quite far away, but at least I now believe they exist!

After an amazing few days in Waterton, we moved on to Fernie, where the highlights were walking up the ski hill we spent so much time on last winter and seeing it without snow and an absolutely amazing breakfast at the Red Tree Lodge. I had something called Decadence For Breakfast, which was french toast stuffed with banana and Nutella with a side of fresh fruit and maple syrup. We'll be coming back for more of that in a few months!

From Fernie we drove to our final stop, a beautiful mountain resort called Nipika. It's 32km from Radium Hot Springs, deep in the forest close to Kootenay National Park.

Nipika has eight log cabins built round a meadow. It was absolute dog heaven because Macy was allowed off her lead to run round, meet other pets and frolic in the stream - and the humans didn't have a bad time either. I absolutely fell in love with their little blue roofed cabins and despite the fact the weather had changed for the worse by the time we arrived, we had a great weekend reading books round the open fire. Nipika is added to a growing list of places we must return to!

We arrived back in Ralston last Sunday with apparently noticeable tans after our Indian summer in Waterton and in the last few days temperatures have been dropping steadily. It was -5c when I went to work this morning! Still, we have lots to keep us busy including sausages and thrift shops, but more on those two subjects in my next post!

If you'd like to see more photos of our travels, click here or use the link on the right hand side of the page.

Sausages and quilts

This week's blog post is mostly about sausages and quilting, an unlikely combination I admit!

Firstly the sausages. A few years ago, Hutch, one of the British civilian employees here at BATUS went to great lengths to get a recipe for proper British bangers, he also tracked down a supplier for the rusk and spices and found a local butcher to make them.

Even then, getting them made was far from straight forward because the Canadian butcher refused to believe that the quantities in the recipe could be right, but eventually the first batch was made and they were a great success. From then onwards Hutch's little hobby has grown into a small little club of ex-pat sausage admirers!

Last month Hutch got head-hunted and left Alberta for a new job in Vancouver. As one of his sausages biggest fans, he decided to hand the reins over to me.

So last week, I drove down to Premium Sausage in Seven Persons, near Medicine Hat and placed my first order for 20kg. I will collect the freshly frozen results on Friday morning and I am already considering expanding the range to include leek and Stilton sausages too!

As you can see from the photo above Premium Sausage, like most of the locals, are very excited about Alberta's latest Canadian Idol winner, the third in only six series. Theo is from Lethbridge, a couple of hours away and so in the grand scheme of Canada, he's a local boy!

This week I have also be finishing my latest quilt which was a slightly more ambitious undertaking than the last one. It is made from more than 500 individual pieces of fabric all of which I had to cut. A rather tedious job!

My colleague Jenny said the colours reminded her of the American flag, so it its henceforth known as the American Flag Quilt. As you can see, when I completed it the cat showed her usual appreciation of all clean linen, by sitting on it. It will be her new favourite sleeping place until she has moulted black hair all over it and then she'll abandon it in search of somewhere cleaner to sit!

Back to (dog) school

With Jim back in the UK on a course for the next fortnight, I'm home alone on the prairie this week, but fortunately with more than enough to occupy me!

Macy started a new term at puppy school on Thursday. Before the summer she graduated from puppy pre-school and will now spend the next eight Thursday evening's doing the canine equivalent of Grade 1. In her class are our good friend's MaryAnne & Ed and their dog Reggie. Rather handy for sharing lifts, but as we discovered last week, rather distracting for Reggie when he's trying to learn AND show off to his best puppy buddy!

Also in the class was the owner of a young collie who seemed to have mistakenly wandered into our group with a fully trained performing dog. Whilst the rest of us were patiently running through "sit" and "leaveit", she was showing off polished performing skills worthy of Britain's Got Talent! Nobody likes a show off, so lets hope she gets moved up a class!

Also in our group was an employee from BATUS called Michelle. Now Michelle and I speak everyday when she calls BFBS to enter the competition I do on the radio show. However despite this, we've never actually met, which was somewhat confusing because she recognised my voice when I appeared in class and came up to say "Hi" to me. This resulted in a very embarrassing moment of zero physical recognition from me whilst I tried to fathom out why she was so earnestly and enthusiastically greeting me!

Meanwhile, autumn continues to add it's vibrant colours to the village pallet. I have been kidding myself a little that it has arrived later than last year, but after looking through some photos, I realised that it was a year ago this weekend, that we visited Dinosaur Provincial Park in shorts and t-shirts and returned in the afternoon to take photos of the village with brilliant blue skies and striking yellow trees. So the seasonal shift is running to schedule!

Top photo in this post today is courtesy of Nikki Balldock, another army wife here at BATUS. It's me during the pre-calf roping brief at the rodeo.

'Little House On The Prairie' goes to print

This month Little House On The Prairie goes to print, as this blog becomes a monthly column in Downland Village Magazine (see left.) So a warm welcome to any new readers in the Chichester area who has just discovered this site.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, here on the Albertan prairie there are signs all over the village that autumn has arrived. I went out at the weekend to take a photo of one tree I had noticed turning golden and found, when I started looking, that there were actually several.

It's astonishing how quickly the weather has changed from the debilitating heat of three weeks ago, to nights which now touch freezing point.

The above ground pools that popped up in gardens over the summer are all being drained and packed away for the winter and once again the village social life has started to revolve around the ice arena, which after a summer without ice, was opened up again last week.

The second year ladies team (who I played for last year) are in hockey school this week and the season begins in earnest at the end of September.

Having had my turn on the ice last year and lived to tell the tale, I have decided this winter to spend more time on another great Canadian past time - quilting. We have an excellent teacher in the village and although Jim is utterly baffled by the concept of spending hours cutting up fabric, to only spend more hours sewing it back together. I must say I am rather enjoying it!

This week Macy also starts the canine equivalent of first grade at obedience school in Medicine Hat. On our last course we were one of only two dog owners who managed to complete the course, so it will be interesting to see if this group have better sticking power!

5c and raining!

Lots of cold damp weather this week and to make matters worse the boiler in our house has been condemned, so we are without heating! I've been making lots of cakes in the kitchen to provide an excuse to run the oven to keep us warm. We are of course living on top of Alberta's most profitable gas field, so our gas is very cheap! (not something you want to hear in the UK right now, I know!)

Thankfully despite the rumours circulating the village that snow is on the way, it seems the opposite is true and temperatures should be back up to 27c next week... but in Canada, you never know!

Still, at least the bad weather has provided lots of opportunities to stay inside and plan the road trip we are doing with my parents. We have finalised our route and the stops we will make and the map of the right shows where we will be going. (click on it to see it full size)

First port of call is Elkwater, Alberta, then down across the border into the US and Great Falls, Montana. On to St Mary, Montana, back into Canada and on to Waterton Park in Alberta, across to British Columbia to visit Fernie (our favourite winter haunt) and finally to Kootenay and a place called Nipika.

We seem to be scraping into every stop just as the shutters are being pulled down for the end of the season. We are hoping we won't be too late in the year to dine at our favourite Italian restaurant in Waterton town!