19th July 2008 We are now in Toronto with Amy's car and the children. The car in Toronto is almost more trouble than tits worth as the authorities are red hot on parking and it involves careful reading of the complex parking restrictions and moving the car from one place to another to avoid getting fined. After breakfast we decided to take the children to the Toronto Science Centre (to escape the heat). It also has an official car park where you can leave the car all day. We found our way there with the aid of the Sat Nav, but it seemed further away than we thought. It is a superb centre, very large, and plenty to entertain the children and adults. We tried everything on offer and were worn out by lunchtime but after ... read more

17th July 2008 We arrived back in Guelph about 6-30am having driven all night in shifts from Detrioit airport. Managed to get up again about 9-30am and try to get ourselves sorted out for the next stage of our trip. Richard and Amy had lots to sort out including washing and packing for their trip to Halifax. We could also catch up with the blogs we had not yet posted. The late night early morning had resulted in our photographer (Dinah) getting a migraine so we are short of pictures to use on our blog today. Went to the red brick cafe in Guelph for lunch. Marta arrived in Guelph with William and Hannah about 4.00pm and left them with us while she took off for a girlie weekend in New York. It was very hot ... read more

15th July This will be the last entry until we get back to Guelph very early on Friday morning as we will be travelling all day tomorrow to catch the plane in Seattle. The day started well as I got all the laundry done and Amy got her her run before we set off to Whistler. What we had not realised was the road over the mountains was very windy and narrow so took a lot longer than we had anticipated. After a brief stop in Cache Creek (not a memorable place) and at Pemberton (up and coming due to the Winter Olympics in 2010), we arrived in Whistler at 4.00 pm. Amy was too late for a half day mountain biking which looked lethal down a hairy course and hired a bike instead for a ... read more

13th July 2008 The regular readers of this blog may notice that we have only just discovered that we failed to publish the 10th July in sequence but having already prepared it have now published it, better late than never. Also we have included in todays blog some pictures from yesterday just to confuse you further. After our very late finish last night we slept in until 9-30am this morning. We went for breakfast to Evelyn's Cafe on the high street in Banff. After breakfast we made our way to the summit of Sulpher Mountain by Gondola together with coachloads of tourists. The views from the summit at 7,486 were spectacular but there were still a lot of higher snow capped mountains around us. Sulpher Mountain overlooks the town of Banff but the Gondola seemed to ... read more

12 July 2008 Today we set off to the Calgary Stampede, some two hours drive from Banff. We thought that the traffic might be bad as they get so many visitors to the stampede and decided to make an early start. We left the hostel around 8am before most of the other residents had woken. The traffic was not as bad as we expected and so we arrived much earlier than we had planned. We missed the direction signs for the stampede car parks and ended up at an ice cream and milk shake parlour for our breakfast. It turned out that the owner of the shop had been a steer wrestler, but had broken his neck doing this so had retired to run his shop. He also told us we could park outside his shop ... read more