Socially Distant Banff, Part 1

Banff needs our tourism. With the reopening of the town and the preferences for staying-in-your-own-province tourism, we were able to snag a somewhat last minute hotel reservation that included two rooms and a kitchenette. Friday was no holiday for Canadians so the town was much emptier at the start of our long weekend than it got as the weekend wore on. As we'd all recently acquired hiking clothing and shoes it was also a good opportunity to start breaking things in before our upcoming epic camping road trip. And celebrate that the kids are now my shoe size, so when they grow out of their (apparently very comfortable hiking boots) they will be MINE.

We started the trip with a short hike around Middle Lake. It was absolutely stunning with the wildflowers blooming everywhere. It was humbling and frustrating to know that there was no way to properly capture the colors and depths with camera lens, so I stared around and willed myself to commit the beauty to memory. There just happened to be a picnic table free just before the return to the parking lot, so we could soak in the view a bit longer while eating lunch. Whatever else happened, it was a great start to the trip.

Our attempt at a second short hike on the outskirts of Banff was dashed due to flooding, so we decided to try the hotel and hope we could check in early. No such luck. We let the kids hang out and read while we took a wander around the hotel neighborhood. We managed to find a little prairie dog village and enjoyed watching them run around.

Dinner was at Park Distillery, and was as yummy as we remembered. We were a bit nervous as it was the very first time we'd eaten inside a restaurant in four months. Not only was the city of Banff accommodating - the main street was closed to car traffic and open-sided tents were set up in the middle of the road for breezy, socially-distant dining but the restaurant itself, where our table was, kept things very distant. We ended up at the very front of the restaurant where the enormous, garage-door windows were open so we were essentially eating outside in the breeze.

Finally back to the mountains

For three months there was COVID. Just when restrictions lifted, we used the opening of the mechanic's to get the car fixed - the problem was OK for us to move around the city (our weekly trip to the grocery store) but potentially not safe enough to drive an hour out of the city. So that takes a couple of weeks. Then a weekend with pouring rain. Then Terry does who-knows-what to his foot and can barely walk.

Because he was still not 100% from that last one, we picked a spot where he could walk or sit as much as he liked. Forgetmenot Pond is stunning. The pond itself is pretty small, only about 15 minutes to circumnavigate it. It was a perfect spot for a picnic, some pretty pictures, and I got to walk a few times around and admire the views from all angles.

On our way back we stopped to check out this ram, just hanging out on the side of the road.

We also stopped to see Elbow Falls. It's a very short walk from the parking lot to the falls, and Zoltan and I took a small adventure climbing up on a side path into the woods a bit.

It was not a particularly strenuous day and yet when we got home we were absolutely beat. All that mountain air, I guess? And the COVID getting-out-of-shape?

Rhubarb

Terry's favorite pie is rhubarb. Not rhubarb and strawberry - that's too sweet. His second favorite is apple and that is what he normally gets, because we haven't lived in places where rhubarb is particularly available. There's a family legend of very young me, and a friend, "helping" a neighbor with weeding and pulling up their entire crop. Perhaps that is the root of my earlier aversion?

In any case, when a neighbor on my local Buy Nothing Facebook page asked for help in reducing her enormous rhubarb crop,I was more than happy to start my education about what to do with this bitter fruit.

First up, of course, was the pie.It doesn't look that bad, but what you can't see is the ocean of liquid. We've been having issues with the oven and I am pretty sure it is not to temp (oven thermometer on order as there are none to be found locally. Probably has something to do with all the baking the rest of the world is just now discovering.) It didn't taste bad, once we had drained out a ridiculous volume, but it was not delicious.

Next up was rhababarkuchen from the German baking book our au pair had given me. In true German form, it was a little closer to bread than cake - only the tiniest bit sweet - but much better than the pie. The dough gave the moisture somewhere to go.

Then, the woman who had the glut of rhubarb mentioned again that she was still pretty chock-full and don't forget you can get up to three harvests from one plant. So back I go. A bunch got frozen for future experimentation, and a pound went into apple-rhubarb sauce. Yum.

Fresh air and exercise

Terry likes to play around with woodworking projects. As previously mentioned, wooden pallets are routinely available for picking. The three-tiered planter featured in the last post is one such pallet creation.

Before one can start working with pallet wood, one must first disassemble the pallets to free the wooden planks from all its other wooden plank neighbors.  Crowbars and hammers play a role here.  All the nails must also be removed.  It is a bit tedious when you are talking about removing five planks from each of a dozen pallets.

We have an accumulation of pallets. The weather is beautiful. The kids have a day off from school today (that sounds weird to say, I know, but it means that had they actually been in school they would not have gone today, and the child who does get daily assignments didn't have any for today). Put that all together and we get - Workforce Friday!

Garden!!!

We were lucky enough to get a spot in one of the two community gardens we applied to. Then, after we got that notification Terry found a few spots in the back yard where he thought we could grow a thing or two (it is so shady back there we wrote it off at first).  On Canada's version of Craigslist - called Kijiji - there are often pallets available in peoples' yards for free. It is an entirely contactless experience, if also sometimes a disappointing experience when someone else grabbed the best wood just before you get there. Terry picked up a few and made this awesome planter, which will eventually be mounted into the fence! We're planning a row of lettuce, a row of various herbs, and a row of spinach because one of the children will actually eat spinach (as opposed to chard or kale) ... as long as we refer to it as lettuce. The sacrifices we make for our children's health.

The community garden had a socially distanced tour Saturday morning and Terry went, as this is definitely more his thing than mine and we had a hunch there would be some good tips shared and local gardening in general and the mechanics of this community garden in particular. He came home as close to elated as his stoic self ever is.

After dinner the whole family went down to be introduced to our garden bed - they are all raised beds and each is named for a flower, ours is Aster. Terry and I measured and planned and planted the few cold-weather direct-sow seeds we had - radishes, beets, snow peas, and lettuces. The kids played in the adjacent field, creating some kind of disk golf game that involved their fleeces as "home bases" and Alex's shoes as markers of where the disk last landed.

Look at Terry's super fancy "saddlebag" system for his bike!  He designed it himself, and the buckets handily hold garden tools, seeds, and as necessary - dirt.

The Ballad of Broken Glass

We'd been warned before heading to Calgary to save up for a new windshield or two. Chips, cracks, hairline fractures, the traffic kicked up a lot of rock and every single Consulate vehicle ended up with broken windshields. It wasn't whether, but rather when.  One overachiever managed to crack his windshield on his drive to post.

The first crack appeared in November or so. It seemed enormous and dangerous to me at first, starting several inches from the bottom left and moving toward the north/northeast. We called around for quotes and discussed our work schedules to see who could bring the car in, and when.

We marked where the crack ended and tracked how much, and whether, it grew each day. Some days it did, others not so much. We stalled and hesitated. We noted the seeming proliferation in cars driving around with cracks in their windshields. Of the six cars parked closest to us in the Consulate garage, four of them had cracks - and two of them were very nice cars (I don't pay attention to cars much, maybe they were Lexus or Beemers or Audis?) Walking around our neighborhood one day we noticed more than half the cars on one block had such damage. Apparently this is a thing.

We discussed further and reasoned that we were likely to sustain further damage and how many times did we really want to pay for new windshields? The crack did not impede vision, and there didn't seem to be any laws against it like there are for broken headlights.

Some cracks we've seen reach from one side of the car to the other. I think when we get there we may look into a replacement. Or whenever we depart Calgary.