Sunday drive…

..again! We are getting into a bit of a habit. It seems when we are home for a weekend, we get the itch to be on the road, even after last weekends marathon roadtrip. It was about noon when we packed up and hit the highway. We drove north, for the entire length of 52nd St from south to north, west on McKnight Blvd then north again on Barlow Trail past the airport. We turned west onto Country Hills Blvd to Shaganappi Trail then for the first time ever, onto the Brand new Stoney Trail, which is the north part of the Calgary ring road that is under construction.

This project had been ongoing for 3 years now and it is finally open… well, almost. You see, if you drive from the west to the east as we did, the rest of the new freeway from Center Street to Deerfoot Trail (about 1km) is not open yet. It goes from a 6 lane 100km/hr freeway, to a left turn onto a 2 lane 60km/hr country road to nowhere. Yeesh… the line up was pretty solid.

It really seemed like there were too many cars out here on a Sunday afternoon, and soon we realized why we felt that way. There was paving happening on the Southbound lanes of Deerfoot Trail, at the new interchange onto the still unopened portion of Stoney Trail (where we should have come out if it was open), and they had 4 lanes of 110km/hr freeway squeezed into a single lane, which in turn had the entire freeway at a standstill for about 15kms back toward Airdrie, which in turn, backed up all these country roads with supposed shortcutters.

We were stuck on the country road for about a half hour until we got to the turn off into Balzac to have a look around Bucars RV store. We did happen to get a look at a Carriage Cameo like the one that Dee and Jim just bought after selling all their stuff with plans to go fulltime RVing in the new year. Dee and Jim are a couple that we follow and they follow us on these blogs. They sold their condo, paid cash for their new RV and are living the dream now, way to go you two. It’s a REALLY nice Fiver!

Once we were done at Bucars we decided not to sit in the line of traffic, so we went north into Airdrie and then east out into the countryside. It wasn’t a very warm day, and was kind of windy, but it was still very pleasant to be out of the house for the afternoon.

Oh, in the tiny little… um… I’m not sure what to call it… It is named Kathryn on the map, but there is only a school and a church there, so I guess I would call it a country community center. We stopped at the country community center of Kathryn, because there was a playground there and it was just time to get out and stretch our legs again. Here is the result.

After that we got back in the car and enjoyed the rest of our trip back home.

This is Lake Chestermere, just east of Calgary. I thought they would have drained the lake by now as it is just a dammed up section of the Western Irrigation District, but it’s still full. This scene looks very different when there is no water here…

We were  just in time to make supper. mmmm supper. Since we had the cast iron pan, and we had some frozen Pickerel (walleye) fillets given to us by Uncle Mo last weekend (Caught by him at Chitek Lake, SK), we figure a fish fry was the way to go. Yumyumyumyum!!! The fish didn’t last long enough for pictures, but take my word for it, Northern Saskatchewan Pickerel is the BEST eating fish in the world, holy moly was it good. On top of it all, Mary Jo and Greg had brought us some fresh corn yesterday that we put on the BBQ and it was the BEST we have had all corn season this year. Golly, it sort of became a supper that everything was given to us, it was even cooked in a borrowed pan!! LOL too funny…

That’s it… goodnight now.

Pic of the day, It was hard to choose. Andrews spirit is amazing. Look at that dimple, I could just squeeze him!