The Badlands at Drumheller

In the middle of September we went to the town of Drumheller, just over an hour's drive east of Airdrie. It's the home of the Royal Tyrell Museum, one of the leading palaeontological museums in North America, as this part of Alberta is famous for its dinosaur finds.

Cochrane Labour Day Parade & Rodeo

The first Monday in September is Labour Day here, a national holiday. In Cochrane it meant a huge parade through the town, and the climax of a three day rodeo event. We went to both, and very interesting it was too. And hot, well into the 80s. We should have visited the rodeo the day before though, Kiefer Sutherland was there..

50 days in.. we're still going!

I don't think I'll be able to do a daily update of what's been going on, at least not for the last 37 days since my last post, you cannot imagine how much has been happening.
We've been planning this move for years, researching it, getting things ready in advance, and still it's been pretty much non-stop since we arrived. The weather for the first 6 weeks has been amazing, which meant that any time we weren't doing important stuff, we were sightseeing somewhere.
I'd love to do a detailed report on what we've been up to, but that will have to wait until I win the lottery, retire and have time to write a book about this adventure. I'll summarize it as best I can briefly..
When I left you with the last post, we'd just been to Canmore, having been here for three days. Wow, that seems a long time ago, I think we were still jetlagged then.
Since then, mostly we were occupied with house hunting. Grandma did a sterling job of looking after at least one of the children, sometimes both, whilst Olga and I went to view houses with our realtor, Eric. We saw 16 houses, some in Cochrane, some in Calgary and some in Airdrie. After a week we narrowed it down to second viewings of two houses, one large condo apartment in Cochrane, and one modern townhouse in Airdrie. We opted for the modern, 3-storey house in Airdrie, it was built in 2009, needed no work doing to get it ready (the Cochrane house needed the basement finishing), and the seller was happy to move things along quickly. We made an offer (at the asking price, this was not a situation to start quibbling) on the afternoon of Thursday 15th August, it was accepted that evening, and our proposed date for closing the sale (when we would get the keys and it would be our house) was accepted - Friday 30th August, just 2 weeks later.
That two weeks was hectic, as Olga and I had to start back at work, as well as organise house insurance, complete the mortgage formalities (thanks, mum!) negotiate buying a car, sort car insurance, health cards, social security numbers, nursery for Danil, school for Lara, visiting the dogs. This required many trips to and from Calgary during the week, and because the weather was so nice, at the weekends we went to the mountains or to Calgary, or to Airdrie for more recon trips. This meant that in the nearly three weeks that I had a hire car from Avis, I drove over 3000km, or 1800 miles, more than twice the distance from Lands End to John O'Groats. Good job driving is easy here, and cars have cruise control. Our new (used 2010 Dodge Grand Caravan) car has a DVD player for the kids to watch in the back, and that is proving to be worth its weight in gold.
It included trips to Banff, Lake Louise and Canmore, where we'd stayed when we came over at Christmas and New Year, so it was very interesting to see it in Summer as well as Winter.
Back to the house purchase - the seller was so comfortable with the deal that they signed their bits of paperwork within 48 hours of accepting our offer and went off on holiday for 2 weeks! That seems to be how business can be done here.
The other not-so-minor thing on our radar was our 40-foot container with all our stuff. The shipping company at this end had contacted me to say that it would arrive on a train into Calgary during the weekend of the 24/25th August, so 4 weeks from when it left Bury. They were happy to hold it until Saturday 31st, so when our house purchase completed as planned on Friday 30th August, it was all systems go for the container to be delivered the next morning. This house is around 1400 sq feet, and the house in Bury was nearer to 1800 sq feet, so there's a lot of stuff that's gone into the garage here, but things are starting to find  a home slowly. As I type now, four weeks into this house, we're about two-thirds unpacked.
The house has four bedrooms, one on the ground floor that we use as an office, one three on the top floor. The dogs have the ground floor pretty much to themselves, although we let them come to the living room and kitchen diner in the evening once the kids have gone to bed. The dogs seem to be absolutely fine, just their normal selves, and we've even taken them to one of the local, dedicated "off-leash" parks where they can run about in complete safety off the lead, which is something we daren't let them do in the UK.
Dan is in a nursery here in Airdrie, their hours are 6.30am to 6.30pm. We try to get Dan there early, by 7am, but we are also trying to pick him up by 5pm if we can. He's settled well, though he's had three days off nursery this week with a high temperature. Given the new environments and people he's been exposed to recently, it's a surprise he's lasted this long before catching something.  His walking is very good now, as is his climbing. Talking is coming on, his favourite word is definitely "no", which he uses a lot, along with very amusing facial expressions to back it up. But he's also very good with "Mama", not too bad with "Papa" and his "Wara" is coming on a treat. He understands instructions now, so "come here", "lie down" and "please don't put that in there" - relating to anything that might go in an electrical socket - usually get the desired result.
Lara is happy in her school, she's in a French Immersion class, which means the whole school day is conducted entirely in French! It's like this for three years before they start doing things in both languages. She loves the whole idea of the yellow school bus, and it seems to be working well, she's not missed it yet! We have to get her packed lunch ready each morning, so that's a new experience, as she was on school dinners in Bury. She already attends swimming lessons at the local leisure centre, and today she started a one hour class of "All kids of sports" there too, which she'll go to once a week. In October her ice skating lessons start, and soon we'll book her in for more skiing lessons, so she'll certainly not get bored.
I do catch her saying things in French, and it's almost becoming automatic already, especially simple things - she's saying "Merci" now instead of thanks without thinking about it.  She knows numbers, colours, and letters and all this in less than a month. It'll be wonderful to see what she can say in 6 months time.

I think we're about up to date, I've been a bit more verbose than I thought I'd be. I'll do a couple more posts now with some photo albums to show what we've been up to.

Canada - we're here and trying to blog!

OK, as I write this my count "up" clock shows it's been 12 days and 17 hours since this adventure started.
I'll give it a go to present a snippet of what's been going on on each day...

Wednesday 7th August
I had to stay up all night to get lots of paperwork things finished, pack my things and screw the wheels onto the dogs travel crates. Auntie Gill and Uncle Ron arrived at mum's house at 6.15am to give us a hand getting to the airport and onto the plane. They were great and I dread to think what chaos would have ensued if we'd not had their help.
I'd hired a van to get the dogs and the suitcases to the airport, and it was a good job I did:

To be fair to Air Transat, they took all our bags, car seat, pram, baby carrier and two dog crates in their stride. It took quite some time to get the dogs processed and off through security:

It then took ages to get us through security and into the departure hall, we had about 40 minutes before the plane was due to leave, and the screens were saying "Go to Gate..." - just enough time to buy some water and head to the gate then? Nope. Immediately announcements were made that it was final call for our flight, and just to spite us, the gate was the furthest one away. A brisk walk turned into a full on sprint once they started making Last Calls for the Armstrong group. Anyway, we made it, last ones on, but they had no issues with us using Dan's car seat for him (it was 6cm wider than their stated maximum width, but we weren't going to point that out to them). The flight was fine, the kids were well behaved, Lara got very good indeed at taking herself off to the toilet, she must have gone 12 times during the flight.

Immigration and customs at Calgary were no problem, everyone was very friendly and helpful, and the only casualty was that we lost one wheel off Jackson's crate - a design fault on the part of the wheel, nothing to do with my wheel-fixing ability! All our forms were stamped and we heaved our luggage into arrivals; it's 2pm local time, 9pm UK time now:

We're staying in the basement flat of another British expat in Cochrane for the first month, and Carolyn came out to collect as many passengers and bags as she could fit into her car, while I went and sorted out our hire car. Olga and I dropped Lara off at Carolyn's house and then took the dogs up to the kennels where they'll be spending a month:

That was a long day, but other than the dash through the airport, there were no disasters. The weather is a bit grim, warm but heavy rain showers.

Thursday 8th August

Regardless of how late we went to bed, jetlag had us up early on Thursday morning, like around 4.30am. That wasn't such a bad thing, it gave us chance to unpack a bit, and for Olga and I to sort out paperwork for today's agenda.  At 10am we went to the local branch of Scotiabank and finished the process of opening our bank account, which we'd started online a few weeks ago. Then  we went to meet Eric Boyd, the realtor ("estate agent") Olga had found to help us locate a house to buy. We viewed five properties in Cochrane that day. More rain today.

Friday 9th August

A wasted drive into downtown Calgary this morning, to try and sort out healthcare cards. We'd been given out of date information about where to register, but at least we had experienced the commute into downtown, and it's wasn't bad at all. More house viewings with Eric later, in the city of Airdrie, just north of Calgary, where we were also able to sort out our healthcare, so we're now covered in case of illness or injury, phew. Saw one very nice house in Airdrie which is definitely a contender. The weather improved as the day when on, it was lovely by mid afternoon, just in time for the weekend.

Saturday 10th August

Dan's starting to get the hang of getting over jetlag, he's waking around 5.30am now, everyone else seems to have adapted just fine. It's a bit misty, but Lara, Grandma, Danny and I head off to find the local river in the morning, to skim some stones. It's the Bow River, it's big and very fast flowing. It flooded 6 weeks ago, causing millions of dollars of damage around Calgary:

Later that morning we headed back into Calgary to have a walk around the park down by the Bow River, and by then the sun had come out:

After Calgary we headed out to Canmore, a lovely town in the mountains, about an hour's drive west of downtown. We'd stayed there for a few days during our holiday at Christmas, and we wanted to see what it looked like in Summer. The kids enjoyed the big car we'd rented, too:

Canmore was threatening with thunderstorms, this is something we've found - the weather can be lovely on the plain but 20 minutes later, it can all change. We parked by the town pond, where Olga and Lara had done some ice skating on our last trip:

And that will have to do for updates for now, it's exhausting just remembering how busy we've been for weeks!

More on the house hunting later...

Last night of normality

Here's a view of our office tonight, it's the last refuge of things that won't be packed tomorrow or Friday when the packers arrive. They're due to come here for 4 days and "wrap and pack" everything, and on the fifth day - next Wednesday - the 40-foot container will arrive outside and they'll load all of it into that.
That's the plan, anyway. So this evening we've been trying to clear the ground a little in some rooms so they can find something to do tomorrow. Stranglely, perhaps, we're going to tell them to start in the most-used room, the kitchen.  We've borrowed some crockery and cutlery from my mum, stuck it in a cupboard in the kitchen and stuck a note on the door of that cupboard saying "Please do NOT pack anything from this cupboard". That should do the trick. Everything else in a cupboard is fair game, though not everything on the worktops... there's no reason for us to take a toaster, kettle or microwave, whilst they might just work over there, we've got to have some fun buying new ones, with the right plug on!
It's proving quite difficult to balance everything at the moment; Olga and I are flat out with work commitments, partly by coincidence and partly because we need to get some jobs done before we go. We're also busy trying to cancel things, arrange things, sell things, buy things, pack things and throw things away. Danil has got in on the act by deciding tonight at midnight that he was bored sleeping in his own bed, so he's watching nursery rhymes on our eee-pad in the TV room while I write this post and try to get some more work done. Olga's committed to giving some online training tomorrow morning to three Kazakh gentlemen at between 10am and noon, and the packers are due to arrive between 9 and 10am. I've applied for a Canadian American Express card this evening, as we already have UK ones, and they tell me they'll just transfer our credit limit over to the new card, using our rental address (with owner's permission) but still they want a phone number, which I don't have...
So, I thought I'd get myself a Canadian SkypeIn number, that would work. Nope, the Canadian authorities haven't given Skype the correct license to do that yet, so I've had to use an American number, from Grand Falls, Montana. At least the number will work, if AmEx need to call me, it's not like I've lied..
That's typical of what we're going through at the moment. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel rushed up on us, and we've gone from feeling calm and collected about the whole thing to wondering if we'll sleep during the rest of July.
I think things will look quite different tomorrow, especially in our kitchen!