Dave, Mel, Sarah and Freud in Ottawa.

Our Canada trip is coming to an end. We said goodbye to Ottawa a couple of days ago. We went on several walks, had a few nice farewell dinners, Dave played a final game of tennis and we got a couple of souvenirs.

It took us 9 hours to cross the country and get to Vancouver. We stopped in Winnipeg, and inexplicably also Edmonton along the way.




Winging across the frozen wasteland that is central Canada. Flat for thousands of kilometres.












What is this green stuff? Grass you say? Haven't seen that in months!





Vancouver is a halfway point between Ottawa and Sydney in so many ways. The temperature is halfway (about +10 instead of -12 or +25), the grass is green and so are the trees, there are birds to be seen everywhere. There is a beautiful harbour which reminds us of home.

Waterbird in Stanley Park.

We walked around the entirety of Stanley Park yesterday, about 9km. It is an awesome park, somewhat like the botanical gardens in terms of proximity to city, and it is endowed with ancient tall trees, waterfalls and ferns. Really quite beautiful.





Tribal statue on the Vancouver foreshore.

The Olympic rings somewhere on the harbour foreshore in Vancouver. The winter Olympics start here in a month and they are going Olympics crazy here.

Today we're going on a little ferry trip to Granville island and then we catch our flight back home in the evening! Homeward bound after so many months.

The Full Mandy

Our very first blog entry had a picture of the gorgeous Mandy, a Canadian friend of ours who was in Australia at the time of our departure. She returned home just before Christmas, and we went to visit her for 5 days over the New Year period. This is the story of those times.





Mel and Mandy huddle together at a ski resort one lunchtime.







Wasaga Beach is about 6 hours drive west of Ottawa. In the summertime it is a bustling lake town, with its 14km of shoreline reportedly the longest freshwater beach in the world. It also lies in the snowbelt of southern Ontario, and boy did we experience a lot of snowfall on our trip there!

We got to experience many joys of Canadian winter life while we were at Wasaga Beach. The first was snow shoveling, a task made more or less enjoyable (depending on your perspective) by the amount of snow falling during the day.
Although there wasn't great packing snow, we attempted a snowman.

Dave fondles snowman. Snowman feels all shivery inside.

We visited a number of ski resorts, as the area is replete with them. One beaut area we traveled to was called Blue Mountain. It had dozens of ski runs, a small village packed with shops, restaurants and bars and happy tourists and skiers. It was temperate while we were there (for Canada at this time of year that is - about minus 2), we stood for ages watching people glide down the hill. Or stack it. We were watching for the stacks of course.

On New Years Eve, we had the house to ourselves since Mandy and her family were all out working. It was atrocious weather outside, and warm and cosy inside, and tragically we both fell deeply asleep before midnight...

Mandy on the other hand hit a deer at 2am driving home (or it hit her, she didn't actually see the thing). She was all right, although her Mum's new car, and the deer, didn't make it through unscathed.

Mel and Mandy pose before the exciting vista that makes snow tubing possible.

A day of action ensued, as we visited Snow Valley ski hill for some 'snow tubing'. The pictures really explain the activity, although the visceral thrill of strapping three tubes together and whizzing at 80km/h down the slope in the freezing cold is hard to explain.

Us and our tubes.

Check out the frost on Mel's face.

We had a really great time with Mandy while we were there - good conversations, good food and good cheer.

Then it was time to go. It took us 9 hours to complete the 6 hour drive back to Ottawa, mostly due to weather conditions like below. We made it out of the region in two hours, just 30 minutes before they decided to close all the roads! We saw a number of accidents on the trip home, but luckily none of them involved us, and we made it back in one piece in time for a late dinner.

Where exactly are you meant to drive on this...road?