Adventures of the Grey Cup kind

November means two things to me; adding another year to my age and my annual trip to the Grey Cup. This year, the Canadian Football League Championship was played in Winnipeg. It marked my 6th Grey Cup overall and 5th in a row. As my rotation ended conveniently a few days prior to the festivities beginning, I arranged my flights to go directly to Winnipeg from Yemen. It was great to see my annual friends again. As always, the parties were great and the usual ridiculousness and stupidity ensued. Unfortunately, the game did not live up to Grey Cup standards, but the weather was great. In the end, I was in Winnipeg for 5 nights and was quite relieved to get home on Tuesday.

Every year, we try to make a point of doing some exploring in the host city. Our non football related adventure in Winnipeg consisted of touring the Canadian Mint. The tour was really quite good and definitely worth the visit. Interesting note: I would be worth about $2.3M if I was made of gold according to one of the interactive displays. Another highlight of the weekend was seeing Tom Cochrane play live with the Winnipeg Symphony on Saurday night.

Summer Road Trip Photos

After much delay, here is a link to pictures from our summer road trip.

Summer Road Trip

I've been looking for a new photo hosting site to be able to post pictures to this blog more effectively. I think I have found what I was looking for so I will try to post more photos.

Doing Good Things in the Desert

Last week, I had the very fortunate opportunity to participate directly in one of our community relations projects. In the local villages, schooling ends for students when they reach around 14 years of age. We have started a scholarship program whereby we would pay the tuition and living expenses for qualifying students to attend secondary schooling in one of the cities.

Being that Yemen is one of the more corrupt countries in the world, we need to be very careful when making any payments to individuals so that they are not construed as bribes. This is why I was involved, to verify that our payments were going directly into the hands of the students.

While in the village, we also toured through 2 different schools and handed out some soccer balls. It was a very good experience and incredibly humbling. The poverty is amazing. It was uplifting though to be a part of such a worthwhile project.

Satellite Image of my Home

Google Earth has refreshed a large portion of their satellite pictures. One of these updates is of the facility where I live and work. The picture above was taken sometime earlier this year while the facility was still being constructed. However, you get a sense of the layout.

This picture blows up the upper left corner of the first picture. I've labelled a few of the buildings including my cabin and office. I hope this gives you a better idea of where I spend the majority of my time.

If you haven't checked out Google Earth, you are missing out on the best free software I've ever seen. There is a link on the right to the download page. If you do have it, try to find the co-ordinates shown below to get a better idea how remote our location is.

Alberta Bottom to Top

Just before I headed back to work, I attended a 3 day conference in Edmonton. Taking full advantage of having to drive up north, we took the absolute most scenic route. Heading straight north from Coleman, we took the forestry road into Kananaskis country (first 3 pictures). We've spent very little time in Kananaskis and were blown away by the beauty. Also, there is wildlife everywhere. We saw two moose, a bobcat and deer (and a porcupine later in the day at Lake Louise getting all kinds of attention from the tour bus people). We detoured to Upper and Lower Kananaskis lakes and took a back road into Canmore, arriving from atop the mountains directly south of Canmore. After a nice meal, we continued to our destination for the first night, Lake Louise. Having been there several times in the past, it still is an incredible place.

We stayed at Deer Lodge which is right up by the lake, behind the fancy Chateau. When we used to go on ski trips to Lake Louise, we would sneak into Deer Lodge's outdoor jacuzzi after a day's skiing. It kind of felt weird staying there, but it was really quite nice. We went for a walk to the lake at about 10pm and got a very different perspective of the scenery. With an almost full moon in the sky, Victoria Glacier at the end of the lake was absolutely glowing.

After splurging on eggs benedict for breakfast, we headed north up the Icefields parkway towards Jasper. We had a great day for viewing the Alberta Rockies. We took our time stopping at every roadside turnoout, getting full value for our park pass. We stopped at the Columbia icefield (last picture) and briefly contemplated taking the bus tour up to the glacier. That was until we found out you could hike up for free. Being the cheapos we are, guess what we opted for. After a great day of driving, we arrived in Jasper and spent the evening checking out the town. We stayed at a bed and breakfast in town. The next day it was out of the rockies and east to Edmonton. Between this little trip and our visit to Waterton earlier, we really got a great taste of the beautiful province of Alberta.