Not Kansas - Cansas(?)

Greetings to all of you, my friends. It feels like ages since I last posted, mostly because Stuart and I basically fell off the edge of the earth and ended up here in another country. We are definitely NOT in Kansas anymore! Or California for that matter.  In fact, we have landed in Alberta, Canada (so we MIGHT be in Texas since Alberta and Texas are close to the same size, both filled with cowboys and oil rigs and cattle ranches) in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  If you ask me how and why we got here, I can’t answer that, as the last months of prepping and moving are all a blur, so lets just say it’s because Stuart was raised in Alberta and after 30 plus years in the U.S. he got homesick and wanted to be nearer his family and old school chums. So he clicked his red shoes and here we are!

 Actually it was way more complicated than that (reams of government red tape and many, many hoops through which I am still jumping, to get me on the road to a green card sos I don’t get deported 😁) plus the actual act of moving all our worldly goods 1,286 miles. 

I know, I know, we lived in a 210 ft tiny house on wheels so really how much worldly goods could we possibly have, but somehow we managed to fill a 26ft U-haul to the bursting point, so I guess one can store A LOT of worldly goods in totes beneath the axles of even the tiniest of houses.

My son, Simon bought the tiny house and rolled it off to a wonderful new habitat outside of Reno and Stuart and I (and a willing ex-big rig driving friend) drove 3 LONG days up to our new home here in Alberta. 

Our old digs are in good hands. Off to Reno for further adventures. 

We are living on the property of Stuart’s brother (85 acres of aspen, fir and pine) in an 800 square foot caretakers cabin midway between Calgary and Banff National Park. So not quite in the Rockies but close enough to see them and certainly close enough to visit once we actually get unpacked.

Our new digs.

We have been here 4 weeks now but it feels like centuries longer, mostly because it doesn’t actually get dark til after 11 and so I keep forgetting to stop doing chores and actually sleep. And since it gets light at 4:30 again, there is plenty of daylight so no excuses not to be working on our to do list. Which is long! 

  Since we are moving into a space that has been unoccupied for at least a year (it was used as a vacation rental before Stuart’s brother bought it) there were some immediate issues we had to address (broken toilet, broken refrigerator, flood into the house due to a burst pipe in the wall, just when we had gotten everything moved in and arranged, so we had to take everything out again, tear up the floor and carpets and dry things out before take 2), you know, the usual bumps in the moving road…

  We are getting closer to settled, although we still need to rebuild our 10x12 storage shed (our cabin is bigger than our tiny house but there is almost no storage and we can’t leave things out in the yard once the snows come), put in a big picture window so we get some light in our bat cave so we can survive the long dark winter days, and install a  more efficient wood burning stove in our gigantic fireplace (which is currently huge enough to roast multiple walruses (walri?) for our winter feasts but which will also burn an entire season of firewood in one night).  So…all work and no play makes for a very dull post but hopefully we will have some time for proper adventures in a few months. 

  We DID visit the capital of Alberta, Edmonton, shortly after we arrived to attend a nephew’s wedding. Its quite a happening city, with beautiful green spaces and the wild North Saskatchewan river winding through it. Unfortunately the air was so smoky from the fires burning further north that all my photos are grey, but it really is a vibrant city. 

The Canadian Empire.

Edmonton in smoke.

And we also managed one trip into Banff National park (we had to get out if our house while it was drying) and had a sweet hike around Lake Minniwanka where we met a nice baby mountain goat who happily posed for us so you can have your Canadian Rockies nature pics after all. Happily we didn’t get any photo ops with resident grizzlies but we did see warning signs on every trail forbidding people to hike in groups of less than 4. I assume because grizzlies prefer 4 course meals?

Lake Minniwanka near Banff

Canadian Rockies

More rockies

I think this baby mountain goat might be an animatronic model set up to please the flatlander tourists. Either that or it’s on the park payroll because every time anyone held up a camera or phone it would turn it’s good side just so for the prime shot.

You too can have a moose in your yard…for a mere $3399 CAD!

At any rate I will hope to write more interesting posts than just moving drudgery in the future so check back now and then. 

    Au revoir. that’s Canadian for tootle loo)