New Home, New Life, Empty House

I was going to blog, my faithful readers, but I have very little time these days and haven't had a good chunk of time to sit down and write properly.
So I write now just to tell you I'm still here! We've been doing a whirlwind of packing and driving in the last few days, and it's almost at an end. I have taken lots of pictures, but I happened to be not thinking (surprise!) and left the photo-removing device in Fernie at the new house. You'll all have to wait for photos at a later date.
In the job-hunting department, it's kind of at a standstill right now. The interview was alright..didn't leave there super excited or feeling overly positive, but we'll see what comes of it. I have a few options at hand right now and I have to do some serious pondering in the next couple of days.
I just finished packing the main chunk of the kitchen this morning/afternoon, and have done nothing else. I'm pooped and starved! Lunch is on the stove, and I'm going to sit down and relax for a few minutes before I have to run and do a whole whack of errands for the rest of the afternoon. Not thrilled about that! We're getting rid of a bunch of things and the car will be jam-packed with all our donations!
On a side note...our neighbors on both sides of us are over-decorating for Halloween and I think it's DISGUSTING! Both have put "home wrap" type "bricks" on the fronts of their homes, and their front lawns are littered with tombstones, corpses, and the like. This morning they were dubbed (by us) "the houses of hell". Gross. We're rather glad to be leaving town at the end of the week! We won't have to deal with this next year, thank goodness!
Anyway, my lunch is ready....I'm going to sit...on my bed (the only place left to sit!)...and eat my lunch!

~K~

A Photoless Trip

I guess the title is somewhat deceiving, but honestly, I only took pictures on the way out of this li'l fella...ok...ginormous creature...

Seriously, this guy was HUGE!! There are almost always elk to be seen going through Field, BC, but not like this one! We stopped to snap a few shots and kept on our way.
Aside from icky weather on the way to Abbotsford, the trip was rather uneventful.
The boys had pretty icky weather on Saturday for the wedding they were shooting as well, but aside from being exhausted at the end of the day, I think they had a great time too! I got a chance to visit with all my favorite people during the day on Saturday, so my visit was also a success :)
Friday night we all sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, which turned out quite well and we had a great time!
Thanks, mom, for all your hard work!
I'd better head off to work now, have a great day!

~K~

Hiking Centennial Ridge, Aug. 30-AKA Duane's Birthday!

On Duane's birthday we went out to Kananaskis for a ridge walk with Kevan & Leah and their friend Jody. It was a beautiful day for a hike, and while it was long, it was still beautiful! It was pretty amazing how different the weather is from one side of a mountain to another, though. It was mostly warm to start with, but by the time we were reaching the ridge it was getting more and more windy and frigid! There were such strong gusts of wind that I was able to lean back and the wind held me up! Once we summited there was SNOW! Good grief. Most of the walk down the backside was snowy, but once we hit treeline it was gone. Thank goodness, because it was a LONG walk back out.
After the hike we drove into Canmore and tried out a new restaurant for dinner. We have decided it will be our new dinner spot after K-Country hikes :) Once we finished we piled in K&L's car and drove back to pick up our car. We had to start out with a shuttle because of the fact that this wasn't a circular hike, it was one end to another.
Anyway, here are my shots from the day!




~K~

Flathead Valley/Bigfork, Montana

Duane and I headed down to Montana once again for a long weekend trip. It has become a favorite place for short trips! There's a lot to see and do down there! This time we stayed at a little motel in Bigfork and did a day hike in the Jewel Basin to Birch Lake. It was hot, hot, hot!

As we arrived at our "destination" motel on Friday night, the sun was setting and Duane and I, naturally, decided to take out our cameras and grab a few quick shots.


Like I said, we stayed in a tropical destination motel...our suite was Jamaica! What fun. Jamaica in Montana...interesting :)

Our hike up to the lake was quite nice. We had stunning views of the Flathead Valley pretty much the entire way up! It was probably 32 degrees that day and we were quite low on water, unfortunately, so when we arrived at Birch Lake we both jumped in! It was refreshing, but also way too cold to go in again once I was out! Duane opted for a second swim and I just stood at the edge of the water and kept my feet cool :) We noticed some good-sized lake trout in there as well! After our cooling off, we took a walk around the lake before heading back out. It took a lot longer than expected, but it was quite nice anyways. There were no wild animal encounters, which is good, considering we were told of a bear sighting as well as a couple of mountain goats up at the lake. We were also lucky to have a hike nearly to ourselves. We met up with a few couples on our way in (and they were on their way out), and the lake was empty when we arrived. There were more people on our way out, though, and they were all on their way to camp at the lake, so we were glad to have cleared out before they all got there! We much prefer to hike without massive groups of other hikers.

After we got cleaned up at our motel, we drove into Bigfork to find a place for dinner. Well, the restaurant we ended up at was a lot nicer than we were hoping for! We looked at the menu and wanted to leave! Nothing appealed to us and it was pretty pricey. There didn't seem to be any reason to spend an arm and a leg on food you don't really want to eat! In the end we asked for the lunch menu and there were more items we would actually eat, so we ended up staying and having a nice dinner.

Our drive back to Alberta on Sunday was nice; we took the Going-To-The-Sun Road and it seemed like EVERYONE in Montana was also driving that route that day! There were crazy amounts of people on the highway! Duane didn't particularly enjoy the touristy part of it and didn't feel it was worth the $25 we had to pay to drive it. There were lots of stopping areas along the way where you could get out for pictures or to go on short hikes. I would have been interested in hiking had we had a bit more time to do so, and had there not been so many other people! As I said before, we much prefer hiking without throngs of people around...and that would have been way too much! All of my pictures from this part of the trip were taken from inside the car while we were driving/crawling/stopped along the way. There was also quite a bit of construction, which accounts for the stopping part of our drive :) We also made one last pit-stop once we were just about to meet back up with the highway that would take us back into Alberta...I was in dire need of a coffee!! Then we headed back on our way.

It was a great trip and really nice to get away from the city...oh how I can't wait until I can enjoy small-town life!

~K~