Trip Report and a New Place!

I've been procrastinating on updating the blog, as I know this will be a long one! Ben and I returned a few days ago from our amazing three-week road trip across western Canada and the US, and are still trying to re-adjust to normal life. Luckily, the gorgeous weather in Calgary is making this task much easier! It also doesn't hurt that Ben has this week off of work so there's time to recuperate and finish sorting out our new house.

In a bold move, we switched from our apartment downtown into the main floor of a house about a five minutes' drive west of town ... the day before leaving for our trip. We came home to a mess and have been slowly unpacking boxes, in addition to sorting through the rubble that results from three weeks of living out of a car!

I'm glad to say that we are still very happy with our choice to move. The quiet neighborhood provides the best night's sleep I've had in a while, Bosco loves the small backyard, and Ben and I have already discovered that we're a short 15-minute walk from the city's biggest and best park, a two minute walk from another smaller park, and 1/2-mile from the grocery store, liquor store and everything else we could need, not to mention how great it is to wake up on the ground floor to the sounds of birds, not jackhammers, and to have a kitchen that Ben and I can both fit in at the same time!

Now that I've elaborated on our new place, time to move on to the good stuff ... our trip! I've decided to break it into several different blog entries, to make it a bit easier to scan through - I will warn you that this will probably be long, so read what you want, ignore whatever I seem to blab on about, and hopefully enjoy!! It was the trip of a lifetime, and I wouldn't hesitate to encourage everybody to visit any of the sites we were lucky enough to see :)

I would suggest starting at the bottom and working your way up, as I'll try to post everything in the order that it happened... please be patient, as it may take me some time!