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Published: November 19th 2008
So I’m a little behind on my posts, I know this, just thought I’d update with what’s been happening in my new home of Calgary!
So Simone and I met up at the good old HI Central in Vancouver, where my Canadian adventure started! I had said goodbye to the parentals, they had a very very long flight ahead of them! Simone and I had a walk around the city and picked up some random things for our trip, then went to The Beaver for dinner. Ahhhhh, The Beaver! So many memories from The Beaver, so much of our time was spent there! They’d changed the menu.. Not so much the menu items, there were a few new things there, but moreso the look of the menu. Other than that, the place was still pretty much exactly the same!
We had an early night because we had a very early start the next morning with a long drive ahead of us! Our roommate was a little annoying, coming in and turning the lights on at whatever time in the morning, and just being generally inconsiderate. Simone decided that we should be as noisy as we could the next morning, to get back at her. Simone can be spiteful sometimes :P
I woke up to find a drunken man sleeping outside our door, basically had to step over him to get to the shower.. Nice! We checked out and made our way to the car rental place, but not before I introduced Simone to the wonder that is Tim Horton’s, and we swung by the apartment the parentals and I stayed in, to pick up one of my suitcases.
Our hire car was awesome, it was the same type that I had driven with my parents, a Chrysler something something.. Only this was a Dodge. We had to go to my old neighbourhood of Burnaby, to pick up my crapload of crap that I had in storage while I had been travelling. Ugh. How I’ve managed to accumulate so much stuff, I’ll never know!
After that we were finally on our way, it felt good to be driving on the highway! We had a few scares on the drive to Calgary, mostly because I was afraid Simone was going to ram into the poles on the side of the road, so I think I freaked her out a little with my constant shrieking! We had two real scares, where people were changing lanes and coming towards us in our lane. These two times were the only quiet moments in the entire drive there, we were shocked/scared into silence.
We had grand plans of visiting Lake Louise on our way to Calgary, but by the time we got there it was pitch black. The drive to Calgary from Vancouver is wonderful, by the way.. It’s through the Canadian Rockies, so there is always something gorgeous to look at! At one stage we were in need of some petrol, and turned down some random turnoff in the hopes of finding a petrol station. This turned out to be the wrong turnoff, and we were led down the darkest, creepiest road I think I’ve ever been on. It was a one lane, tree lined totally dark stone road, and we needed to get out of there as soon as we could. We both had visions of a scene out of a horror movie, where some two-headed freaks had put up signs for food, petrol and hotels and placed it in front of this dead-end exit for stupid tourists like us to follow and eventually be tortured and killed. Think we were over-reacting? You didn’t go down this road!
Of course there was nowhere to do a u-turn, so at one stage I did a 103-point turn, in order to avoid sudden death by driving into the tree covered ditches either side of the road. We finally got out of there and, once we were on the main highway again, realized that the petrol station was at the next exit.. Of course!
On the side of the road I noticed lots of traffic cones. I decided it would be fun to steal one of these traffic cones, and Simone agreed with me. Because of my mass of luggage, the only place we could fit it was in the backseat, fluorescent tape blinding everyone that drove past us. We finally arrived in Calgary, many hours after I had hoped we’d get there. There were so many police cars out, more than I think I have ever seen. It was crazy. Of course this made me nervous, considering we had a stolen traffic cone in plain view on our back seat.
I asked Simone what she thought would happen if we got caught, she casually said “ohh we’d get thrown in prison and then deported”. This obviously did wonders for my already heightened state of paranoia! It was like I’d been smoking the ganja.. I was certain we were going to get arrested, and I couldn’t bare the shame of being sent home for stealing a TRAFFIC CONE! When the car in front of us got randomly pulled over, I decided it was time to ditch the traffic cone. I pulled over into a side street and we dumped the thing. Not before taking a few photos with it though, obviously! As soon as we were sans traffic cone, my blood pressure dropped considerably.
Google Maps proved to be less than helpful, as were were driving around for what seemed like hours trying to find our house. We ended up in the SE, when our house was in the NW, so completely the wrong end of town. I wanted to call Tom so many times so he could come find us and let us follow him to our house, but it was getting close to 1am on a school night, and we were determined to find the place by ourselves. We were so frustrated and tired by this stage though. We finally happened upon our house and I could not have been happier! Best feeling!
Now we had to find the keys. We were given instructions that they would be under a pot plant, near the stairs. There were many potplants on and near the stairs, so we began searching. Simone found them, but swiftly dropped them. They fell through the decking, and under the stairs. Awesome! It was 1:30 by this time, and pitch black. I’m sure that if any of our neighbours came out to check what all the raucous was about, they would be certain that we were trying to break in. We had no torch, so were using our mobile phones and the flash of my camera to retrieve the keys from under the stairs. Eventually we found them, they were in a pot full of dirt, nails and cigarette butts.. Gross!
It was so exciting to finally be in our house after all that time, but we were so tired that we could hardly enjoy it. We checked out all the rooms, laid claim to our favourites, took a few photos and were off to bed. We had to be up in a few short hours to return the hire car!
..So I’ve written a fair amount already and that was only about the trip, so I might post this now and write another entry about our Calgary adventures, just to break it up a little!
Kirsty xx
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Vanesa
non-member comment
Lol
And here I was thinking the Greyhound was dangerous...sounds like driving is just as bad. Lol Good to hear you're enjoying Calgary.