The Final Chapter home to Canmore
Trip Start
May 24, 2008
1
12
Trip End
Jun 2009
Canmore, Alberta, Canada
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Just a bit less than 10 days to go before we start home.
Sad news for us, a good friend Bob Reddick, passed away in his sleep back in May. This reaffirms why we are out and about. Other sad news is that we had to put our big malamute Cedar down last week.
She was failing badly, not eating and after 12 great years we decide it was time. Lots of sadness for us but she had an outstanding winter up here in Yukon. She got to ski or walk every day off leash. Although she was losing weight over the winter she was in great condition and loved the exercise. We have lots of great memories of her and have received quite a few e-mails from friends remembering a particular time they had spent with her. We know she's up in malamute heaven sorting out the others.
July has been spent with great summer conditions. Last summer there wasn’t any warm weather and so far we’ve had outstanding weather.
Our garden and greenhouse have given us great produce. We’ve been eating spinach and lettuce for the past few weeks and we also have eaten zucchinis and the odd tomato and I’d say we will get lots of tomatoes before we leave. Our peas just have flowers this week and the carrots are growing. Our potatoes
(14 hills) don’t have flowers yet so Buck, the owner of our house, will benefit once we leave.
With Cedar not doing well and the bugs being bad we didn’t hike much but we’ve continued biking on the road. We have been lake paddling a few times though on Annie Lake and Fish Lake.
We did drive up on Montana Mtn down above Carcross one day with Ron Adams and Clare Massicotte.
The whole mountain has exploration roads on it so a 4X4 can get you up high to start a great hike.
We also discovered the hiking down Annie Lake Rd. This gravel road is maintained in perfect condition by a mining company so hiking access is great. The way the mountains are built here is that it only takes an hour or two to get to Alpine then once up on the mtn you can walk almost anywhere across the flat tops.
August 11/09
Our good friends from Thompson MB., Tom and Sandra Crawford arrived near the end of July and we had a great visit with them. We did tourist thing around Whitehorse and took off down the Klondike highway to Skagway over to Haines on the ferry and on up to Haines Junction and back to Whitehorse. This is known as the Golden Circle route and we’ve done it three times in the last year. It never gets old. We love the idea of driving two hours to get to the ocean. The fresh fish are great as are the crabs.
We went out to an all you can eat crab restaurant and Tom ate them out of crab!!! Cheryl and Sandra stopped at one Dungeness each while Hugh ate red meat..
It was really great having such good friends come all the way from MB to see us and for them to experience some of what we have in the past year.
Our final weeks were taken up with many parties and small diners. We were taken out to eat at a great restaurant on the Alaska hwy by our good friends Dick and Cheryl Smith. Dick and Cheryl billeted me while I was up here two winters ago for the winter games. We have become good friends. They even tried valiantly to teach us how to play bridge. They were our go to people if we needed anything.
Our friends also threw a going away BBQ out on an acreage. It was really great to see all the different folks from our different groups of friends all in one place. It was truly amazing to realize how many people we got to know in the short time we were up here.
Suddenly it was time to leave. We packed up our shipping crate and sent it off to Canmore.
We were ready to go. The weather was hot +32C so we headed out and only got one hour out of town. We stopped at a campground and went for a paddle. 29C at 10 pm. This is the North?!!!!
We met some friends who were heading off on a short canoe trip up a series of lakes and the next day we accompanied them up the lake and through a set of creeks to another small clear lake. We toasted our leaving again with them had a quick dip in the lake and headed off back 3h to our campsite.
Our trip home was uneventful. We did pass by forest fires burning down to the road and ran into the Aug long weekend crowds along the highway. It was only 2300 km of travelling and approx 25 hr total of travelling time. Overall average speed of 79.9 kph (Got to love a GPS!)
The re-entry to the south hasn’t been too bad. We always thought Canmore was quiet vs the city but comparing it to Whitehorse it’s down right noisy here. There are so many more people down here but we are slowly getting up to speed.
Ending off this blog I wondered if I could come up with something profound….. I got nothin’!
We did what we set off to do. We wanted to travel, see new places and meet new people. We’ve made a lot of new friends and done a lot of things, seen some new country. We certainly love the north. The folks we met in Yukon are outstanding. We are going to miss them. Heck, we already miss them and we’ve only been home a week.!
We did it because we could. If you read the first instalment of the blog, I said the same thing. You perhaps, have to be old enough to understand that statement.
Over the past year we’ve lost one Father, three friends and one dog. We’ve had friends getting diagnosed with cancer. We’re not standing still.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." (Mark Twain)
Ok perhaps this isn’t profound and I had to borrow from a great author but………
