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Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig
Oct. 5th, 2024 08:58 amIt's so good to be home again! We just spent the last couple weeks in Ontario. Stay tuned!
Forgot how fun Map Loco is--hopefully I'll get to more places in the coming years!
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Let's try British cuisine
Jun. 9th, 2024 06:45 amSo you might be wondering, what the heck am I looking at here?
There's no shortage of jokes about British cuisine, but the bean-covered meal was cheap and ridiculously delicious! Milton Keynes has this amazing mall with an outdoor food fair with more things than our bellies could fit. After London, where we ate overpriced ice cream, it was a relief to find some budget-friendly fare. For example, the London hotel buffet breakfast was 22 pounds and in MK it was 13 pounds. The Canadian dollar was not in our favour either. $1 CAD = 1.77 pounds.
Somewhere on Instagram prior to our trip I discovered bean-covered baked potatoes are a street food and I joked to hubs about how I had to try it. My wish was granted! What you're looking at is 1.5 baked potatoes covered in butter, then covered in shredded cheese, topped with beans and crispy onion bits on the side. Different toppings were available, like chicken, but I wasn't feeling that adventurous :D Honestly, I'd have it again in a heartbeat.
Other foods we tried--Nutella-filled chimney cakes, a "French taco"--which is a filled burrito pressed to perfection in a panini grill, Gregg's famous sausage rolls, scones with clotted cream and jam, fish and chips (of course) and meat pies. We had a hotel hamburger since we landed late at night and it was interesting. The beef certainly was different from back home, but still delicious.
Getting back to meat pies, we tried two different kinds. One was more traditional and the other was this giant man-sized pie with thick crust. Both were amazing in their own right. Hubs tried jellied eels at the one pie place and I couldn't watch. Bleh! It was so unappetizing.
We visited a Bangladeshi restaurant in London because hubs just had to try chicken tikka masala. The British concoction is best described as dessert butter chicken. It's super sweet and heavy on coconut flavour. Here at home it would be a spicy feast--but the British way is so inoffensive and unadventurous.
Two Turkish restaurants and a fast food donair place were within walking distance of our hotel, so we tried all three. The lamb iskender was so tender at the fast food place and the olive dip amazing at all three. Mmm!
We didn't try a lot of snack foods. I bought a hazelnut Aero bar and it was super sweet, even for me.
If you visit the UK, be prepared for a lot of salty, greasy fare--I was definitely hankering for a green vegetable by Day 4 of our trip!
There's no shortage of jokes about British cuisine, but the bean-covered meal was cheap and ridiculously delicious! Milton Keynes has this amazing mall with an outdoor food fair with more things than our bellies could fit. After London, where we ate overpriced ice cream, it was a relief to find some budget-friendly fare. For example, the London hotel buffet breakfast was 22 pounds and in MK it was 13 pounds. The Canadian dollar was not in our favour either. $1 CAD = 1.77 pounds.
Somewhere on Instagram prior to our trip I discovered bean-covered baked potatoes are a street food and I joked to hubs about how I had to try it. My wish was granted! What you're looking at is 1.5 baked potatoes covered in butter, then covered in shredded cheese, topped with beans and crispy onion bits on the side. Different toppings were available, like chicken, but I wasn't feeling that adventurous :D Honestly, I'd have it again in a heartbeat.
Other foods we tried--Nutella-filled chimney cakes, a "French taco"--which is a filled burrito pressed to perfection in a panini grill, Gregg's famous sausage rolls, scones with clotted cream and jam, fish and chips (of course) and meat pies. We had a hotel hamburger since we landed late at night and it was interesting. The beef certainly was different from back home, but still delicious.
Getting back to meat pies, we tried two different kinds. One was more traditional and the other was this giant man-sized pie with thick crust. Both were amazing in their own right. Hubs tried jellied eels at the one pie place and I couldn't watch. Bleh! It was so unappetizing.
We visited a Bangladeshi restaurant in London because hubs just had to try chicken tikka masala. The British concoction is best described as dessert butter chicken. It's super sweet and heavy on coconut flavour. Here at home it would be a spicy feast--but the British way is so inoffensive and unadventurous.
Two Turkish restaurants and a fast food donair place were within walking distance of our hotel, so we tried all three. The lamb iskender was so tender at the fast food place and the olive dip amazing at all three. Mmm!
We didn't try a lot of snack foods. I bought a hazelnut Aero bar and it was super sweet, even for me.
If you visit the UK, be prepared for a lot of salty, greasy fare--I was definitely hankering for a green vegetable by Day 4 of our trip!
Travel Preamble
May. 20th, 2024 10:26 amThe best way to start off this travel diary is mentioning travel itself. We quickly realized how rusty we were at vacation planning back in February. This was our first vacation since 2019 and the first time I’ve flown internationally in 40 years. 36 years for hubs. Frequent flyers we’re not.
I bought a crossbody bag for all my essentials since I was paranoid about losing my wallet/phone/passport/credit card and a TURTL neck pillow which I didn’t get to use much on our nine hour flight from YYC to LHR. We’d only flown to the US in previous years, which always seemed to require extra layers of screening.
The fight itself was miserable as most nine hour flights go. I sat in the dreaded middle seat. We left in the evening with the idea that we would nap on the plane. Wrong! Although we had a nice meal and a snack on Air Canada, people would just not turn the brightness down on their seat back screens! I micro-napped but every time something flashed on the screen to my left in front of me I thought we were encountering lightning. The passenger on my right had a hard time getting comfortable and stole part of the blanket I brought for myself :-D The last three hours was marked by a crying toddler who couldn’t settle down. After a while my husband and I were laughing because he was fake crying for attention kind of like our cockatiel used to. We later saw the mom carrying her son over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes through the airport. If premium economy wasn’t an extra $2000 we might have splurged on it :-D
The same thing happened on the return flight, except the toddler scream cried most of the way except during brief naps. At the very end of the flight he tuckered himself out and his dad carried him out asleep. I felt bad for the parents because the kid had so much energy and banged on his dad. At one point the dad covered his hands in his face and that's what I tried entertaining the kid with every little kid song I remembered whenever he looked over the seat. It was such a relief to get back home, I tell you!
Okay, so back to Heathrow, because we held Canadian passports, we breezed through security easy peasy. There were self-serve gates where we just had our faces and passports scanned and it was on to the luggage carousel. It was weirdly simple, almost too simple. From there we caught a cab and it was so neat to just load up with our luggage with us in the cab. The driver is protected by a plastic cage. There’s no need for any interaction at all as you can pay from the back seat.
We were also amazed by how frequently buses and Tube trains arrived, even in little Milton Keynes, which is under 300k people. Buses were coming every 7 to 10 minutes, whereas here you can wait 15 minutes to half an hour, or sometimes an hour for your bus to come. Same for the Tube. It was a little confusing to figure out which platform we were on at first. Now here's the crazy thing--we took the train from London to Milton Keynes for 36 pounds round trip. And it got us there in half an hour. We don't have inter city trains and we barely have inter city buses because cars are king in Alberta.
It would open so much in the way of opportunity if we had some kind of linked rail system. Below is the speed my husband clocked the Avanti train at. It's hard to come back home after a trip like this and see how people get around so effortlessly. It feels like they're living in the future and we're living in horse and buggy days!
I bought a crossbody bag for all my essentials since I was paranoid about losing my wallet/phone/passport/credit card and a TURTL neck pillow which I didn’t get to use much on our nine hour flight from YYC to LHR. We’d only flown to the US in previous years, which always seemed to require extra layers of screening.
The fight itself was miserable as most nine hour flights go. I sat in the dreaded middle seat. We left in the evening with the idea that we would nap on the plane. Wrong! Although we had a nice meal and a snack on Air Canada, people would just not turn the brightness down on their seat back screens! I micro-napped but every time something flashed on the screen to my left in front of me I thought we were encountering lightning. The passenger on my right had a hard time getting comfortable and stole part of the blanket I brought for myself :-D The last three hours was marked by a crying toddler who couldn’t settle down. After a while my husband and I were laughing because he was fake crying for attention kind of like our cockatiel used to. We later saw the mom carrying her son over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes through the airport. If premium economy wasn’t an extra $2000 we might have splurged on it :-D
The same thing happened on the return flight, except the toddler scream cried most of the way except during brief naps. At the very end of the flight he tuckered himself out and his dad carried him out asleep. I felt bad for the parents because the kid had so much energy and banged on his dad. At one point the dad covered his hands in his face and that's what I tried entertaining the kid with every little kid song I remembered whenever he looked over the seat. It was such a relief to get back home, I tell you!
Okay, so back to Heathrow, because we held Canadian passports, we breezed through security easy peasy. There were self-serve gates where we just had our faces and passports scanned and it was on to the luggage carousel. It was weirdly simple, almost too simple. From there we caught a cab and it was so neat to just load up with our luggage with us in the cab. The driver is protected by a plastic cage. There’s no need for any interaction at all as you can pay from the back seat.
We were also amazed by how frequently buses and Tube trains arrived, even in little Milton Keynes, which is under 300k people. Buses were coming every 7 to 10 minutes, whereas here you can wait 15 minutes to half an hour, or sometimes an hour for your bus to come. Same for the Tube. It was a little confusing to figure out which platform we were on at first. Now here's the crazy thing--we took the train from London to Milton Keynes for 36 pounds round trip. And it got us there in half an hour. We don't have inter city trains and we barely have inter city buses because cars are king in Alberta.
It would open so much in the way of opportunity if we had some kind of linked rail system. Below is the speed my husband clocked the Avanti train at. It's hard to come back home after a trip like this and see how people get around so effortlessly. It feels like they're living in the future and we're living in horse and buggy days!
Still here!
May. 12th, 2024 03:57 pmNormally I would say if I haven't posted to LJ or DW in over a week, call the police, something is wrong! However, nothing was wrong--we simply went on our first proper vacation since 2019.
Trip planning began in January as travelling to the UK is nothing like travelling to the US. The flights, although direct, are fewer and we didn't know what wanted to see. Clearly, there's too much to see even in a lifetime, so we made a list and plotted it on Google Maps. Our top attractions were Bletchley Park and the British museum and then everything else was a bonus. My UK coworkers told me to plan to do two things a day and they were so right. London is a big city and many things we plotted where far away from each other. The humidity is also unusual for us from coming from dry, higher altitudes.
London is so busy and visually overstimulating. We think we're big because we're 1.2 million people--oh how naive we were! Anyhow, I'm going to organize all my thoughts and make some posts about it and process my pictures. I hope all y'all out there in journal have a great week ahead!
Trip planning began in January as travelling to the UK is nothing like travelling to the US. The flights, although direct, are fewer and we didn't know what wanted to see. Clearly, there's too much to see even in a lifetime, so we made a list and plotted it on Google Maps. Our top attractions were Bletchley Park and the British museum and then everything else was a bonus. My UK coworkers told me to plan to do two things a day and they were so right. London is a big city and many things we plotted where far away from each other. The humidity is also unusual for us from coming from dry, higher altitudes.
London is so busy and visually overstimulating. We think we're big because we're 1.2 million people--oh how naive we were! Anyhow, I'm going to organize all my thoughts and make some posts about it and process my pictures. I hope all y'all out there in journal have a great week ahead!
Alberta Birds of Prey Center
Jul. 9th, 2023 08:36 amWe took some extra days off around Canada Day, and because my husband works for an American company now, he also had July 4th off. The weekend weather forecast wasn't looking too great--chances of rain or high temperatures--but we played it by ear and managed to get a lot of fun stuff done.
We road tripped down to the Alberta Birds of Prey Center in Coaldale, about 2 hours south of Calgary. My last visit was in 2007 and so much has changed in 15 years. For example, now there's a duck pond, full of domestic and wild ducks and, of course, Canada geese. Baggies of duck chow are $2 and unfortunately, the ducks weren't too hungry as there were also a lot of little kids there, all with their own baggies. I filled the bird feeder with the leftovers, and the house sparrows, who usually eat anything, weren't too impressed. There was also a wetland, which was new to me.
Other improvements include a classroom building with windows to a large eagle aviary, new shelters for the hawks, eagles, and owls so visitors could see them up close, and an improved flying area. The flying area used to just have logs for seating. Now they have comfortable benches. We watched a bald eagle named Jefferson fly back and forth while the handler talked about bald eagle facts. I took my zoom lens and it was worth lugging it around because I got some really nice photos of Jefferson.
I had my picture taken with a burrowing owl named Sage and I looked like such a dork! You'd think I never saw a bird before 😄 Fortunately Sage was up to the task of looking majestic:
Lots of birds are on display although sadly, most of them are injured and can't be released. The centre also does rescue and rehab, so there's always hope when a bird is injured.
It's been ages since we went for a good long country drive, and although we lunch at McDonald's, it was still a nice trip. Hubs and I enjoy long car trips. We talk about lots of things and there's no interruptions. Overall, it was a satisfying day, despite arriving home at 9pm--we paid my MIL a visit on the way home. It was still the kind of day that heralds the beginning of summer :-)
We road tripped down to the Alberta Birds of Prey Center in Coaldale, about 2 hours south of Calgary. My last visit was in 2007 and so much has changed in 15 years. For example, now there's a duck pond, full of domestic and wild ducks and, of course, Canada geese. Baggies of duck chow are $2 and unfortunately, the ducks weren't too hungry as there were also a lot of little kids there, all with their own baggies. I filled the bird feeder with the leftovers, and the house sparrows, who usually eat anything, weren't too impressed. There was also a wetland, which was new to me.
Other improvements include a classroom building with windows to a large eagle aviary, new shelters for the hawks, eagles, and owls so visitors could see them up close, and an improved flying area. The flying area used to just have logs for seating. Now they have comfortable benches. We watched a bald eagle named Jefferson fly back and forth while the handler talked about bald eagle facts. I took my zoom lens and it was worth lugging it around because I got some really nice photos of Jefferson.
I had my picture taken with a burrowing owl named Sage and I looked like such a dork! You'd think I never saw a bird before 😄 Fortunately Sage was up to the task of looking majestic:
Lots of birds are on display although sadly, most of them are injured and can't be released. The centre also does rescue and rehab, so there's always hope when a bird is injured.
It's been ages since we went for a good long country drive, and although we lunch at McDonald's, it was still a nice trip. Hubs and I enjoy long car trips. We talk about lots of things and there's no interruptions. Overall, it was a satisfying day, despite arriving home at 9pm--we paid my MIL a visit on the way home. It was still the kind of day that heralds the beginning of summer :-)
Shaunavon Photos
Dec. 1st, 2018 10:26 pmIt has taken me forever to get around to posting the best photos from our little trip to Shaunavon, Saskatchewan in August. There's still more to come, so stay tuned. Pictured below is Scotty, a female T-Rex that was discovered in 1991 and put on display in 2004. Hopefully next year we can return, find the rodeo grounds and not bake in a heat wave!
Unfinished ferris wheel, Las Vegas
Nov. 27th, 2016 11:27 amOriginally posted by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
calzephyr77 at Unfinished ferris wheel, Las Vegas
calzephyr77 at Unfinished ferris wheel, Las VegasWhile on my most recent trip to Las Vegas, I was kind of bothered by all the empty lots. Many of the old time hotels have been demolished with nothing to replace them. Or, at least, nothing finished to replace them. The strip suffers from empty lot syndrome greatly. It's a little difficult to tease out the "unbuilt" Las Vegas from all the touristy sites, but if you're feeling ambitious and it's not too hot, you can walk the north end of the strip and see at least two unfinished resorts.
If you haven't been to Las Vegas, imagine that each hotel property is the size of a mall. It can take hours to walk the strip and it's very easy to underestimate just how long it will take since everything looks close together.
We did a little shopping as Canadians love to do ("OMG Target!! Kohl's!! JCP!!") and while on the way back to the timeshare we stayed at with our friends (itself surrounded by empty lots), I noticed these giant pillars that reminded me a bit of the poem "Ozymandias"
The two giant legs, in this case, belong to the Skyvue Las Vegas Super Wheel which was supposed to open in 2012. Signs around the lot advertised that the land was for sale. It joins the "Voyager" as an unbuilt ferris wheel - and in case you're wondering one ferris wheel did manage to get built, the "High Roller".
( Pic under cut )
If you haven't been to Las Vegas, imagine that each hotel property is the size of a mall. It can take hours to walk the strip and it's very easy to underestimate just how long it will take since everything looks close together.
We did a little shopping as Canadians love to do ("OMG Target!! Kohl's!! JCP!!") and while on the way back to the timeshare we stayed at with our friends (itself surrounded by empty lots), I noticed these giant pillars that reminded me a bit of the poem "Ozymandias"
The two giant legs, in this case, belong to the Skyvue Las Vegas Super Wheel which was supposed to open in 2012. Signs around the lot advertised that the land was for sale. It joins the "Voyager" as an unbuilt ferris wheel - and in case you're wondering one ferris wheel did manage to get built, the "High Roller".
( Pic under cut )
