Vacation

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. This is not because I have not had much to say, nor is it because I’ve gotten bored with this whole blogging business and am too lazy to write anything. The fact is that I have been busy and will, therefore, have a lot of difficulty relating to all of you what exactly it is that I have been doing without being tedious. I will therefore simply give you an overview of everything that has occurred. If you would like me to go into greater detail on anything, simply ask in the comments. If you don’t have the patience to read all of this at once, I would suggest reading it section by section.

Eliott in Kananaskis

Eliott, my better half as a former boss of ours called him, decided to spend his two weeks off with me. Because I only had one week off, he therefore spent the first half of this watching me (and helping me) work. Before Eliott came here, he spent the weekend in Calgary with his aunt and uncle. He was only going to drive in on the Monday morning.

To surprise him, I called his aunt while I knew he was out with his uncle and arranged to come over to their place with the help Kurt, Tracy, Denise, and Crisia, who had to drive in to Calgary to drop Denise at the airport and were spending the day there seeing the sights. Eliott actually did a double-take when he saw me, as if he didn’t recognize who I was. It turns out that he had planned to surprise me by showing up the Sunday night. We had brunch with his family and spent the afternoon walking around downtown and in the park. After ice cream, we met Kurt, Tracy, Denise, and Crisia, who were having supper, and drove in to Kananaskis together, saving Eliott the trouble of getting lost by himself.

His first day here, we went into Canmore, where we simply walked around and ate lunch. The second day, we spent the day in Banff, where we took the gondola up to Sulphur Mountain, walked around Moraine Lake, and went to the hot springs. Prior to this particular week, I had a lot of free time and could have spent a lot of time with Eliott gallivanting across as many mountains as we desired. However, my supervisor had come in to check on us the evening we were in Banff and was staying for a few days. This was great in that I could finally figure out exactly what I needed to do for my project but not-so-great in that I had a lot of work to do to get my project off the ground before I left for my vacation.

Hence, in addition to accompanying Crisia and me (Nikhil was on vacation in Toronto) on a couple of our long-term grids, Eliott also spent a couple afternoons helping me clean and move cages to set up my experiment. Some of you might find it interesting to know that one evening, Eliott and I cooked supper for ourselves, Crisia, and Jack, my supervisor on Eliott’s third day here. The next morning, Jack took us three grad students (Nikhil had come back) and Eliott for a long drive to find a new site for his field course, and that evening the staff at the field station held a barbeque for all the researchers. This came with free beer and wine, so it took us a while to get everyone up to come out to a brew pub in Canmore.

Jack left early the Friday morning, and after much prodding, a bunch of us took on the 3 hour drive to the Royal Tyrell museum in Drumheller. I believe this was the site of many dinosaur fossil discoveries, so they built a huge museum there. We had a great time there and went to an Irish pub for dinner, where we played Guess Who, Disney Guess Who, and Connect Four. Afterwards, Eliott and I went to his uncle’s house in Calgary to start my one week of vacation, and Crisia, Nikhil, Kurt, and Tracy returned to Kananaskis.

Weekend in Calgary

On Saturday, Eliott, and I took his thirteen-year-old cousin, Emma, to the zoo. We saw a few of the animals that Eliott failed to see in Kananaskis, as well as many more you would never find in Kananaskis. Calgary’s zoo is actually quite well done. After having dinner with the rest of his family, the three of us went to see Ratatouille, which is actually one of the better animated movies I have seen in a while, especially since it takes place in Paris.

The next day, which was Canada Day, all of us went to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, which is a site where the natives used to chase the buffalo off a cliff. There is a very nice museum that goes along with it. We saw the musical ride of the RCMP in a small town close to that afterwards. We took the long way back to Calgary, which is more scenic and passes through a place called Longview, where my supervisor at Concordia told me I would find the world’s best beef jerky. Not being a connoisseur of beef jerky, I can’t tell you that it’s the best, but I can tell you that it is rather good.

The next morning, we were up at 4:30AM to catch our early flights to Vancouver.

Vancouver Part 1

We landed in Vancouver early enough to have an entire day ahead of us. We managed to find our way to Jeremy’s house without too much difficulty even though Jeremy neglected to name one of the stops we needed to get off at. Jeremy rents out a room in a house along with a few others. The owners supply them with food, cooking them their suppers. The owners also have a cat, which I was very happy to learn since I hadn’t seen a cat since I left Bucky at the end of April. We went out for breakfast with Jeremy, took a walk along the coast, and then into Stanley Park. The trees are so big in Stanley Park, and we got to see a couple young raccoons begging for food. After that, we walked around downtown and went back to Jeremy’s to take a nap before going out for a huge sushi dinner.

The next day, while Jeremy was at work, Eliott and I went to Granville Island, which has a very nice market. Not doing very much planning in advance, we ended up walking most of the way from there to the Vancouver Aquarium, which was an extremely long walk. The aquarium was very nice, and we got to see the famous you tube hand-holding sea otters. They weren’t holding hands when we saw them, but they were very cute. Afterwards, we meant to go watch Jeremy’s softball game, but the combination of long bus waits, very poor bus directions (Jeremy neglected to tell us to transfer buses), and an early ending game meant that we never got there, and Jeremy met us afterwards for supper. We played a couple games when we got back: one involving colourful eyeglasses with snake noses and the other involving penguins and fish.

Victoria

Because Jeremy would be working for most of the week, Eliott and I decided to spend a couple days in Victoria. The trip there, including taking the bus to the ferry, the ferry to Vancouver Island, and then the bus into Victoria, took 4.5 hours. We spent our entire time there walking around, going into little shops, and walking along the harbour. The second night we spent part of the evening at the hostel watching a live show. The girl, Felicia Harding, sang mostly folk rock tunes, some covers from Iron and Wine, to the Beatles, to Tom Petty, to Third Eye Blind, to Tegan and Sara, as well as some of her own stuff. Our room happened to be right above the lounge where this was going on, so this is also what we fell asleep to, which was better than the open mic stuff we fell asleep to the night before.

Vancouver Part 2

Upon our return to Vancouver, we were to meet Jeremy at his work to drop off our stuff, but through the combination of somewhat incomplete instructions, our misunderstanding of where exactly Jeremy worked, and Eliott’s possible poor listening skills, we ended up at the opposite end of the city to where we wanted to be. We managed to find our way back to his house to meet him there before going out for dinner on Commercial Drive, where you can find many cute and ethnic restaurants (This also happened to be where we had ended up when we meant to meet Jeremy at UBC, even though we didn’t know at the time that we were supposed to go to UBC).

We spent our last day in Vancouver on the UBC campus, where we saw where Jeremy worked, went to the Anthropology Museum, and walked along Wreck beach. This beach is a very beautiful but interesting beach. If you are unfamiliar with it, I suggest you look it up if you want an idea as to where we were actually wandering. In the evening, we went to the Richmond Night Market, which is like any ordinary flea market except that it’s Asian and operates at night. There they sell your usual cheap clothing, but they also sell popular Asian toys and pirated DVDs. The most interesting part of the market is the food section. It’s like going out for dim sum with you going to the food rather than the food coming to you. It was really rather delicious, but so many little things add up in the end.

Now I’m back in Kananaskis and back to work and will undoubtedly scrounge around to have more to tell you more regularly. I update this post when I have some of the pictures up.

Update

I have added pictures of a coyote and a moose and its baby to the Wildlife in Kananaskis album; these didn't turn out so well. I have added a new album called Hanging out at KFS. Pictures from Eliott's and my vacation, as described above, have been divided into 4 albums: Banff, Drumheller, Calgary, and Vancouver and Victoria. I will eventually get around to captioning some of this. As I get Eliott's pictures, I will also add some of those.