Blogs from Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, North America - page 2

Just seeing if my blog sends out personal emails :)... read more

Fort McMurrayBratty Comment of the Day: I'm so tired! We caught a 4 a.m. flight today to Fort McMurray. Even though this has been a great experience, I haven't slept more than six hours this whole trip. Fulbright Hayes definitely does not believe in beauty sleep. :) As soon as we got to Fort McMurray, we hopped on a bus to tour the Oil Sands. Alberta is the richest province in Canada, due solely to revenue earned by oil mining. Canada is one of the leading producers of oil, sending more oil to the U.S. than even Saudi Arabia. However, Canada's oil is not extracted by traditional drilling. An estimated 1.7 to 2.5 trillion barrels of oil are trapped in a complex mixture of sand, water and clay. Thus, Syncrude, the oil company, uses a complex ... read more

We'll be in Ft. Mcmurray about another week. Most travelblog patrons are young folk on exotic journeys, I presume. Us proud grandparents probably get more grandchildren visits in, more chaotic than exotic but every corner of the round world is interesting as we look for the unique and beautiful. I'm going to show a bit of the snow piled up. Today, my 5-year-old grandson and I spent a pleasant hour at the playground, frolicking in the soft stuff. He enjoyed leaping and sliding off that equipment, landing in the unpacked drifts capped off with the 6 inches (15 cm) of fresh snowfall we received this morning. He was rather oblivious to the cold in his blue snow-suit, boots, and mittens. His new baby sister, Jaryn will also show up in our pictures from the comfort of ... read more

One can only marvel at the wonder of the wide-open spaces of Canada. Here in Ft. McMurray, Alberta exists a modern city of about 60,000 people on what might be termed a frontier of the north. It is a gold-rush city only it is black gold that is trapped in the Great Tar Sands. Huge multi-billion daollar companies with equally huge and elaborate equipment and plants are 'extracting' that oil now for the world market. Our son-in-law is a plumbing contractor, plying his special trade for the booming construction industry hee. Wages are very high, expenses for living are very high and housing costs are equally high. The population is drawn from all of the provinces of Canda and many of the countries of the world. The weather is not bitterly cold but can be at ... read more

Guess who's now got their Canadian drivers license? It’s me. (there are actually a few million correct answers to this question. Send your correct answer in along with your receipt to collect your prize. Prize only available in Canada. Prize may differ from those advertised) Anyway, I now have my full drivers license. I had to take a road test. So I cunningly used my grandads plan of taking the test in a small town with no out of the ordinary features or tricky intersections. So instead of going to Edmonton where they have double laned roundabouts with stoplights in the roundabout and 3 lane expressways; I sat my test in Ft Mcmurray where they have no roundabouts, no hills, and because of the snow, no where to parallel park. Excellent. You may note the title ... read more