Trip 6: CANADIAN HOLIDAY in May 2008 ….. Post 1

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A Personal Note: Harriet (my wife) and I jointly share a spirit of adventure. As we have no mortgage, we are free to travel the world financially. We built a handmade house in 1981 on five acres of land 35 kms. out of Brisbane, Australia for minimal money.

See the house / land posts:

OUR HOUSE …. An Overview

OUR HOUSE ….The Actual Garden  See  the photos of the house and garden and the history of how we obtained rejected materials like from the Supreme Courthouse stone (where the Law Courts are now in Brisbane) …. two loads for nothing in 1980. They dumped 100’s of cubic metres as fill and built a school over the top. The stone was cut out of the Kangaroo Points Cliffs in 1877.

OUR LAND OVERALL

See these travel posts:

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Note:  I would like  to share with  you  through  these few words, photographs and hyperlinked websites, a 3 Dimensional  experience as though you were  actually there with  us. Click on any photograph and it should enlarge to a different size ….. at least half screen or size full screen. It will be clearer in detail than the photo on the post. It will be as if you were  really there looking at the actual  scene. You are an arm chair traveller with us.

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Overview of Our Holiday:

2008 Canada …. Australia to Canada then to Alaska and back again in May 2008:

I wish to share with you some experiences of a trip overseas in May 2008. This is through the medium of photography and blog sites or hyperlinked  websites.

  •    On the 8th May we flew from Brisbane down to Sydney which is a one hour flight
  •    Then we boarded a plane which flew straight to Vancouver in Canada which was a 14 hour flight …. A long trip!! This was a lot simpler than flying to Los Angeles (USA customs etc.) then flying to Vancouver
  •  We had three days to walk the streets of Vancouver ……. taking lots of photos … two days initially then one day when we came back from Alaska
  •   On the second day we caught a taxi to the waiting ship for a week long cruise to Alaska and back again. We cruised right up to the Skagway in northern Alaska and back finally to Vancouver
  •   We then went to Vancouver airport and flew to Toronto …. A five hour trip. One of our friends, Yolanda actually met us at us at ‘Arrivals’ as we are on email with her. She then acted as our personal assistant in getting possession of our hire car and getting us to our hotel. Then she took us out to dinner. It was wonderful in seeing a friend after 25 years. Yolanda (a former Canadian) and her former husband Paul, had moved to Canada in the early 1980’s. We all lived at Chambers Flat on acreage in the mid 1970’s
  •  As we said we wanted to see Niagara Falls, Yolanda contacted friends on her mobile phone who lived up there to meet us and ferry us around for the day. See the post here to view our Niagara Falls photos and Niagara parks
  •  From Niagara Falls, we drove up to Ontario to stay and pick up our 28 year old daughter Claire. She is a primary school teacher who has a special gift with small children. She has been overseas in Canada from July 2007 till June 2008.   She came home three days later on the 3rd of June on a different plane to prepare for doing her Masters Degree in early childhood at Griffith University. She initially went over as a volunteer leader to the Ontario Pioneer Camp which is 1200 acres in extent and has several lakes on the property. One lake is several kilometres across. It is a Christian Adventure Camp which has small school groups coming into camp for a week a time. Claire did an Outdoor Education Course and became an instructor with her team to groups coming in … Sailing, Kayaking etc.  See this post: OUR CANADIAN HOLIDAY in May 2008: Ontario Pioneer Camp in Eastern Canada.
  •  Over the next two weeks, Harriet, I with Claire slowly drove up the eastern side of Canada to Princess Edward Island (PEI) and slowly down on the coast and eventually back to Toronto. We even spent three days on the USA side of the border in Maine and New Hampshire. We particularly enjoyed the travel hospitality of the Philbrook Farm Inn in New Hampshire. See the website: http://www.philbrookfarminn.com/ The place was 5th generation, originally built in 1834. It became an inn in 1861. It was truly finding genuine hospitality on the road less travelled
  •   We then flew from Toronto and back to Vancouver. From there we had another 14 hour flight back to Sydney. We then had another one hour flight back to Brisbane. We arrived back Sunday the 1st of June at 11.30 a.m. where our son Anthony met us at the Airport with our car and drove us back into Brisbane as he lives at West End. This meant that we could then drive ourselves home to Chambers Flat = 35 kms. out of Brisbane.

Harriet and I have been doing some travelling around the world in recent years. See our travel blog on these places. Not only is it fun to travel but it means seeing new and often spectacular scenery and geography. It also means experiencing meeting people in new cultural settings and you realise there are millions of others around the world who live their lives in quite often new ways. They maybe largely ignorant of you and the way you live and where you even live. Some of the people we have met in unusual or casual circumstances. We have just been in Canada in May. In the past,  some of the people we met whilst:

  •     Staying in a 14th century restored Manor House in England on our trip to England in 2003
  •     Walking through the Dodges Palace = 13th century on our Italy trip in 2005
  •     Meeting someone for the first time in Singapore ….. Having this friend on email but we had never met personally. It was a strange experience in actually seeing him in actuality versus only seeing him on a website photograph. He took us out to his district or community on Singapore’s very efficient train system. We went to a communal restaurant where he went around the various restaurant owners introducing us in a very personal way as his Australian friends. This was on our trip to France in 2007 and we had a stopover in Singapore
  •     Staying in Fiji on our trip in 2007
  •     Having coffee or having a meal on our trip around Canada in May this year

I do not drive due to my brain injury and I cannot organise things very well. I used to do this very capably in my former business. Now I cannot. Now Harriet does all the day to day organising and the daily driving. I instead focus on visually recording the experiences through photographs ….. all the places we go to. I came back from Canada with 3000 ++ photographs from our 3.50 weeks in Canada on three 2 GB chips. When I came home, I then downloaded them onto my home computer into many folders and many subfolders. Then I can use them in blog sites of photographs and word explanations. I can then communicate with many associates and friends around the world by sending a few emails.

We were so inspired by what we saw and experienced, that we will put out our email broadcast in a number of parts. Post 1 is on the overall details as above. The next one is on our two days in Vancouver and the next one will be on our Alaskan Cruise and others will follow the above outline.

To see  Ken and Harriet’s Travel post from 2010 to 2015 … Go to this post.

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See the Next Post:  OUR CANADIAN HOLIDAY in May 2008 …. Vancouver Sun Yat Garden: Post 2