Holiday Plan #1 - Canada

As part of our Permanent Residency visa process, we must activate our visas before May 31st 2013, although we don't have to actually move by then. We're going to activate them by going on holiday to Canada over Christmas and New Year - we're now constrained by Lara's school holidays. After much agonising over different itineries and timings, and whether to use a travel agent or not, we've decided to book it all ourselves, and we're flying out on Christmas Day! Besides having the cheapest flights around that period, we also hope the aeroplanes themselves will be less busy, given the plan includes a 10-hour flight and a 5 year old and a 9-month old (by then) might kick up a fuss en-route.
The schedule is an morning flight from Manchester to Amsterdam (avoiding Santa's sleigh if he's late heading back to the North Pole), a 90 minute break there, then a 10-hour flight to Vancouver, where we will have to complete the immigration / visa activation process during a 2 hour 20 minute stopover, then a 1 hr 15min flight to Calgary. We've booked a hotel near the airport for two nights, so we should arrive there about 8pm on Christmas Day night, in time to watch the Canadian equivalent of the Only Fools and Horses Christmas Special, before spending Boxing Day splashing around in the hotel's water park (indoor!).
We've not yet decided exactly how we'll handle the whole travelling-on-Christmas-Morning-instead-of-opening-presents thing with Lara. We think the only way to do it is to bring Christmas Day forward by 24 hours, after making special arrangements with Father Christmas. We can still have the whole turkey dinner thing on Christmas Eve, and Lara can open her big presents then, and I dare say there might be a little one left over for her to open on Christmas Morning, probably 2 minutes before our taxi arrives to take us to the airport. I hope the KLM staff will be all Christmassy, it might make for a more enjoyable flight for Lara. I expect the in-flight meal will be turkey.  I'm sure the Queen's Speech must be broadcast to the Commonwealth, and I'll have to catch a re-run of it, as 8pm in Calgary will be 3am Boxing Day at home.


View Canada Holiday in a larger map
After Calgary we drive to Canmore, pausing to have a look around Cochrane on the way. Both of these places are towns we're considering to live in once we make "the move".
We're going to stay for three nights in Canmore; we'll drive up to Banff for a day, and spend the rest of the time trying to get a "feel" for the town.

It'll be 30th December when we leave there, and we head to a lodge hotel pretty much in the middle of nowhere for the next three nights - the Delta Lodge Hotel in Kananaskis. This was the first hotel we found when we started thinking about a Canadian holiday, as it has a really good, family-orientated New Year's package, with a slap-up dinner on New Year's Eve and a brunch on New Year's Day. They arrange lots of things to do for the kids, and it's right next to the ski park developed for the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988, if we feel like hitting the slopes for a few hours. We can only do that one at a time though, so the other one looks after the kids, so we're not planning on doing much skiing, if any. There is sledging, ice skating, snow-shoeing and cross-country skiing (with the kids in a pull-along trailer behind Olga - well, she's the expert!) to try out as well. This is the lodge in Winter:

 Though this photo gives a better impression of it's seclusion:

We leave there on the 2nd January and drive back to Calgary, hopefully to do some shopping. We'll stay one night in another hotel near the airport, then we fly home on Thursday 3rd, from Calgary to Amsterdam then Manchester, arriving back at lunchtime on Friday 4th. This gives Lara the weekend to recover from any jetlag before starting back at school on the Monday.

The girls' skiing lessons

Lara had her first proper skiing lesson last Saturday morning, she says she enjoyed it, and wants to do it again, which is about as much as we can ask for. She's starting at Level 1, she has three lessons at this level, then moves onto Level 2, and so on. I've booked her place on the Level 2 course today, so I hope she continues to enjoy it!
Olga is making great progress with her lessons, in fact she'll be having her final lesson - Level 9 - this coming Sunday. Here she is making the most of a quiet piste on a midweek evening when she was between levels 6 and 7:

And on that note, it's gone midnight now and my alarm is going off at 7am (on a Saturday morning) so we can get our snow angel to her next lesson. It'll all be worth it........

Danil-tishooooo! Bless you

Olga picked up a nasty cold last weekend, either when we went out for her birthday meal in Manchester with Lucy and Sergei, orwhen we went down to High Wycombe so Lara could go to her best friend Zoe's 5th birthday party, and we could catch up with Zoe's parents, and clear out the last of our stuff from storage. It was great to see Lara and Zoe play together, and they were inseparable all afternoon, but they managed to say goodbye to each other without any tears or tantrums. Hopefully it'll not be too long before they see each other again.
It was only a matter of time before Danny caught it too, but getting to 7 months without a cold is pretty good, but it is also a reflection on how we don't socialise with Danny as much as we did with Lara. She was forever being taken to the pub, but we don't do that with Danny, and Luda is doing such a great job of looking after him during the day that we don't want to change much, but she stays at home with him most of the time. He starts nursery 4 days a week in a month's time, so between now and then we'll get my mum more involved in looking after him, to get him used to her - she'll be looking after him on Mondays once Luda goes home in November - but also so he goes to busy places and gets used to strangers being around, complete with their germs.
His transition onto more solid food is going well, he's eating every two hours, and Luda has a good system going, with Olga just topping him up when he needs it. He's had a couple of disturbed nights this week due to his cold, but nothing too outrageous.
He's still extremely smiley, he sits up perfectly well now, he's starting to roll over on his own, and there's the faintest sign that he wants to crawl.

Bear Grylls? Eat your heart out

Olga got me a great birthday present: a weekend bushcraft course in Oxfordshire! Building my own shelter, sleeping in the forest, preparing my own food, which meant turning a wood pigeon inside out on my first night, before gutting and filleting a trout for lunch on Saturday, and skinning and chopping up a rabbit for dinner. There were classes on foraging for food, firelighting, knife safety, shelter building, trapping and water purification.
There were 15 blokes and 1 one woman on this course, and we were blessed with perfect late summer weathe, and I even survived a Friday AND Saturday night without a beer...

 Where I slept on the first night - we built our shelters on Saturday morning

 

 My shelter takes shape

 Cooking our gutted and filleted trout. I even practised my skills on trout from the fish market when I got home!

 Lead instructor Martyn shows us how to deal with a rabbit. I brought the feet from my rabbit home as good luck charms for Olga

The instructors and some of the customers on the Sunday morning

The idea behind it was that when we move to Canada, I would like us to be able to go out and do the whole "wilderness camping" thing, and this showed me that I could gut a fish, skin a rabbit and get the meat from a wood pigeon, amongst all the other great things we learnt. I might never need to do it again, but if I'm ever in a situation where I need to, now I know I can.

Plenty to catch up on...

Well, another 3 weeks or more slip by without a post, so there's a lot to catch up on. We're just finding that weeks are sliding past without us really noticing - before we know it, it's Friday again. Sometimes that's a good thing, but not when you'd like to blog about what you've been up to that week.
So it's easier to search years from now, I'll do a few shorter posts rather than one long one. We are finding this very useful for checking up on when Lara reached milestones as she grew up, so we can compare to Danny. Apparently she got her first teeth showing through at 8 months; Danny is 7 months tomorrow and no sign yet. Any excuse to put a photo of him up! We staged this one to compare with one I took of Lara when she was about the same age:

 (sorry that Danny one is all wierd looking, my phone wouldn't take a normal photo!)