West to East

​I don’t even have time to go into everything we did in Canada over the last 3 weeks so this is brief. But we’ve been on british soil since 9am monday morning. And Evelyn has barely slept!!! It seems coming home from West to East is more difficult than East to West. She wants to sleep lots in the day and lie in in the morning, but we’ve got her up by 8am and let her have a 1 to 2 hour nap during the day. Shes gone to bed 7pm no problems. But then she gets up between 10.30pm and midnight for 3 to 4 hours. And doesn’t want to get up in the morning. She’s done this all 4 nights we’ve been home with no improvement. 4 days into canafa and she had adjusted. So this morning, being the first I didn’t have to get up and ready for work I let her lie in til midday so that I could too. So she didn’t nap today and refused to go to sleep until 10pm! So maybe she’ll make it to a reasonable time tomorrow morning? 

This jet lag thing is tiring.

8 days til snowdonia marathon…26.2 miles. Shit. Please sleep baba…

This is her about 9am on second day when she didn’t want to get up… cute eh?!

Photos of the travels since radium hot springs (seems a lifetime ago already)…

Waiting to check into our banff hotel:

Back at lindas. I love the banana faces:

We weren’t expecting snow and Evelyn wasn’t keen on the gear she needed to wear to be able to play in it:

We got drunk a few times with the Solomons. They couldn’t have been more welcoming 🙂

We took the kids swimming:

One last road trip for Evelyn to Lake louise via Canmore where we came across a fantastic sports facility called Elevate. They have a climbing wall which you see as soon as you come in, we used the kids pool, Taz used the steam room. It was a nice hideaway when it was cold outside. Evelyn hates the clothes layers when it’s cold, see photos;-)

She cried all the way home from Lake louise to Linda’s 😦 That night she had a raging temperature (again?!?!) and of course she was ill and screaming for hours before bed on my birthday (shit I’m 30!), poor Ev 😦 Perked up a day later for the flight home though but did unfortunately do her fair share of kicking off on the quiet, dark night plane. Neither of us slept a wink. Probably no one in the surrounding area either. Oops.

We’ll miss you Solomons. Evelyn took to you like you have always been around 🙂

Linda thank you for your 2 spare rooms, your breakfasts, brews, teas, tolerance of the ridiculous  noise we made and your company 🙂

Radium Hot Springs

Finally caught up on the blog. Been using driving and baby sleeping hours to write.

We drove 1.5 hours to Radium from Fernie. Cue baby sleep. Cue peace. We have a good travel (or run) while she sleeps system going! 

We had booked a hotel that morning on booking.com again. Turns out it was actually a motel! These are weird. This one was called Radium chalet and was run by a Philipino woman. It was ok! It had a separate living area with a tv so we didnt need to disturb evelyn with our chatting at night. It cost us about £45 and included a breakfast which we made the most of. It was limited in variety but what was there was surprisingly good. A night was enough in this small town.

Evelyn sent her postcards 🙂 We’ll probably beat them home!

We spent a couple of hours in the springs. It’s a cheap and fun way to spend an afternoon. Less than $7 each to get in. It’s toasty in there! Far from the springs we are used to in Thailand which are mostly not so developed! Some strange woman came and started singing lullabys to Ev. The changing rooms are crap but the spring itself is relaxing so job done I suppose!

We ventured to a nearby steakhouse. You couldn’t tell from the outside but we got in and it was busy and the baby was tired and we were like SHIT please don’t kick off. Amazingly we both got to eat hot food at the same time because Evelyn was fascinated with the bowl of grated cheese that the waitress gave her. Thank you waitress. You saved our bacon. And the food was goooood. 

Strangely though the highlight of the day was getting the baby to sleep and finding a current episode of xfactor UK on the TV. We cracked the beers out. It was like date night. Sorted! Small things eh 🙂 We even put the fire on and made it cozy!

We didn’t hang about in the morning. We took off after breakfast. Evelyn had destroyed yet another eating area with bits of everything flying everywhere. We cleaned her up and headed for Banff. We’ve been before. I love mountain towns. The views on the drives we’ve been doing are stunning. Clear water, trees and mountains… 

Kind of gutted we’ll be doing no climbing. We’re in a good spot for it. I miss climbing. Taz has promised me he’ll come with me again when we get home so we can climb outside next summer when Evelyn us bigger and we can escape for days out or take her with us if she’ll hang about with us. I look forward to that.

Such a life adjustment, this child rearing stuff!

Fernie

We spent 3 nights in Lizard Creek Lodge just outside of the town of Fernie. Our hotel was in a great spot to get some pram jogging in! We did 2 runs, one hilly/mountainous and one flat.

We relaxed in the outdoor pool one afternoon which was heated. They also had a hot tub beside it which was really, really hot! All with great mountain view. Another afternoon we took Evelyn swimming at the aquatic centre. That was indoor and a bit warmer so we spent ages in there! We cooked our own tea a couple of nights because we had a full kitchen and we did a few breakfasts at the room too, but ate at Smittys once too and that was the usual fantastic Canadian breakfast with unlimited coffee and tasty eggs and bacon. Our accommodation was huge and we felt at home here. 

We stocked up on beer, whiskey and port at the liquor store and settled in. And snacks! We need something to unwind and we can’t go sit in a bar 😉 Every night is a night in! And that’s still something I’m trying to get used to 14.5 months later 🙂

3 nights later and we packed up and set off to Radium where they have hot springs! Yey.