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29th August 2006

One more day without much happening.

Sat around all day, ate potato chips and played XBox.

We needed to go out in the evening, as Zahir uncle had invited all of us to dinner at a restaurant called Pearl River.

About an hour before we were supposed to leave, everyone needed to take a shower. So we all lined up for the two showers in the house, and waited our turn.

I decided to break in my brand new Oakley slip-ons. They went really nice with my beige coloured trousers.

We piled everyone into our two cars, which was easier getting there than coming back as the van was still out of commission.

The food was quite nice. I had peppercorn chicken, noodles, sweet & sour chicken, some tofu chicken noodle thing, and some beef noodle thing. My favourite was the sweet & sour chicken cos I love it.

It was the first time I had really met Zahir uncle's daughters, Safina and Sorriya, but as per our past encounters, there was little actual interaction between us. They spent most of the evening listening to Sadeeq's quips and anecdotes, which are actually quite interesting.

The journey back was interesting.. We needed to get 10 people into 2 cars, but also leave space for Salim uncle. So 4 of us got into one car, and 6 of us got into the other. I was in the unlucky car with Talib sitting on my lap, making stupid remarks with the other Talib and annoying the hell out of Sadeeq. 10 minutes never seemed so long.

So, the plan for tomorrow? Well, my brother's been given the go ahead to get his iPod nano, which we'll probably get from The Source (yes, that's the name of the store..). As far as our last-day-in-Calgary goes, everything's still in the air about that. I'd feel pretty bad if I didn't get to see Safina this time, as I haven't seen her, face to face, for about 6 years. If we do make the early morning drive to Calgary from Edmonton on Thursday morning, I hope that at least they'll be able to make it to the airport to see us off. Maybe even have a nice fairwell photo or something like that.
That'd be pretty cool.

28th August 2006

Ahh.. Loafing..

Today we did.. nothing.

My parents, Salim uncle & Yasmin aunty and Rubina aunty were all invited to Zahir uncle's suprise party. It was a party celebrating him getting the honour of Canada award for all his voluntary work.

So, anyway, Muj, Aliya, Talib and I were left at home. We played on the XBox for a while but got kinda bored of that. Talib H was at a picnic of some sort, but when he got back we all decided to go down to the local park and play around with Talib and Muj's kites.

Well, I say kites but they were actually blimps, and they were half broken. We got a total flight time of around 50 seconds, but put in something like 2 hours to actually try and get it up into the air! More and more, I wish I had brought my own kite with me.

After that we came home, had some barbecue wings and veggie lasagna, and played on the XBox more.

Today was a pretty uneventful day. But given the fact that the day before had been a really bad day, it's not suprising.

We'll probably be going to West Edmonton Mall tomorrow.

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26th August 2006

Today is our last day in Vancouver. Woke up at about 5 or 6 in the morning thinking that we'd be leaving around 7ish so that we can get to Jasper in good time and maybe see the Ice Fields the same day.

We all got ready, had our showers, and went downstairs to get some breakfast. Alnoor uncle had already started making a pretty big breakfast consisting of waffles, pancakes, fried eggs and cereal. I had some cereal and, for the first time, had waffles with syrup. Yummy!

After a lot of shouting on my dad's part, we started to move our stuff into the van and I gave the car one last quick clean out when Alnoor uncle suggested we give it that power spray that we were thinking of giving it.

We went round the car about 2 or 3 times, and the car looked a lot cleaner after we did. Had a bit of fun with it and got my brother almost completely wet in the centre of his trousers!

After saying our goodbyes to everyone we jumped in the car about 11am-ish, and set off back to Vancouver.

About 3 hours into our journey my mum noticed a lot of smoke behind us. It turned out that it was us that was causing the smoke! We stopped at the side of the highway and my dad opened the bonnet of the van to take a look, tons of smoke poured out of the car. We were all really worried about what had happened, and I felt so worried, mainly because we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

After about 20 minutes a tow truck pulled up, almost out of nowhere, and the guy jumped out and started chatting to us about what could be done. We found out that the transmission had blown, and after abut 45 minutes of phone calls, decisions and discussions we decided to go to Kamloops, rent a car and drive all the way back to Edmonton in one day.

The drive to Kamloops was about 4 hours away, so two of us sat in the cab with the driver, and the rest of us took a $250 taxi ride.

From there we got a bit lucky, as a car at the budget we were at needed to go back to Edmonton anyway, so we didn't have to pay the $500 one-way charge. It came to around $120, which everyone said was a good deal.

We drove and drove and drove, and ended up at a place called Blue River where we refueled both vehicles and had something to eat. The food portions were massive, and I only finished my burger and couldn't finish the chips! Mum and dad shared a roast beef dinner, and mum said that the portion she got was perfect, even though it was half of the actual portion.

After that, Talib swapped with me at sitting in the cab and I got to sit in the car, which was soo nice.

We kept driving, and driving and we finally, after almost 19 hours of driving, we arrived in Edmonton.

The truck had already arrived there about an hour earlier, mainly because he was traveling at about 120kmph, which is about 20kmph above the speed limit in some parts and about 60kmph above the limit in others.

Apparently he overtook a car, and turned a corner at about 130kmph which scared the crap out of Talib and Muj!!

In Edmonton, we decided to meet at Salim uncle's shop, as that was the best place to get someone to come look at the car. We dropped the car off, emptied it almost completely into our car, and Salim uncle's car, and drove back to the house.

The drive from the store to home was the best part of the day, the scene was tranquil, the sun was coming up behind the trees, the sky was turning pink, and there was mist all across the shallow valleys beside the road. I wished I had had my camera with me to take some pictures.

But at least the car was nice and clean.

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21st August 2006 - Day Twelve

One more day in the hotel. But not the best of experiences.

I woke up today and again tried looking for an access point. I think I was beginning to get withdrawal symptoms from lack of internet.

There wasn't really much of a plan for today. We just wanted to get out of that bad hotel.
We needed to move out to our aunt's place, and also needed to meet another aunt for dinner, so we thought we'd go to Stanley Park and visit Vancouver Aquarium.

The aquarium was pretty cool. We saw the Baluga Whales and the dolphins, and there were some Piranas there too. They even had an indoor rainforest, with the lizards, and tropical birds; and there were even really cool butterfiles there too.

We spent about 3 hours there, but we had a really good time. We then left for Amina aunty's house. Strange how a holiday doesn't really feel like a holiday unless you're living with family.

After we had offloaded all our bags, we left for Didi aunty's house, where we were invited for dinner. Along the way we saw a towtruck parked the wrong way on the corner of the road, trying to jump start another car. My dad complained about it, as usual, but I kept on driving and didn't worry too much about it.

We got to Didi aunty's and sat down in front of the TV. One of Didi aunty's daughters, Shamuli, was there with her two kids, Brayden and Trenom. We were waiting for Shamuli's husband, Dave, to arrive before we could start dinner and while we were waiting we recieved a phone call. It turns out that Dave had gotten stuck on the way and needed to call the tow truck out to get him going again. We had actually passed him on the way there! But because it was so quick and none of us were really paying attention, we didn't think too much of it.

After dinner, and the episode of Family Guy we were watching had finished, I got working on Didi Aunty's computer. She needed to transfer some files from her old laptop to her new laptop. It turns out that the files she was talking about were all her emails. I set up a network, and got them connected across, but inadvertently deleted the drivers for the wireless network card.
Because Dave had set it up, but had already left to put the kids to bed, I was unable to get the internet working again. It was past 12 and everyone wanted to get home, so I left it as it was, and asked aunty to contact Dave for the information of how to get it all working again.

We got back to Amina aunty's, set up the beds and fell right asleep.
Apparently I snored when I was alseep, which I only do when I'm really tired, so I must have had a good day..

20th August 2006 - Day Eleven

First thing I did this morning was try and look for an access point to connect to the internet with.

The previous night I had found one access point that had allowed me access, but it wasn't long enough for me to actually get anything done.

While looking for a point, I got a knock on the door and some muffled speech. Thinking it was someone from our other room, I opened the door, only to find a cleaner asking if we were leaving or staying. Hoping that we were getting out of the hotel and into a proper family home, I said that we were leaving, only to be informed that we needed to leave the room an hour ago.

I quickly woke up Talib and Majeed and told them that we needed to leave right away.
I also rang down to the other room, but my parents had left the room to go shopping for breakfast, so we grabbed all our things and got down to the other room.

My sister opened the door and we waited there for my parents. When they got back, my dad told me that he had booked us for another night so we didn't need to leave our room in such a hurry. We had a bit to eat, then decided what we were going to do.

19th August 2006 - Day Ten

Begin Day 3.

Today was spent in Revelstoke.

It's a town about halfway between Vancouver and Calgary, which explains how we ended up there.

All 6 of us were able to fit into one room, which was good as we were all able to stay close to each other, as opposed to being in seperate rooms, potentially on different floors of the same hotel.

Today was spent driving. We reached Vancouver and stopped at a 7-Eleven to top up our phone. About 2 seconds later we got a call from my aunt in Edmonton saying that she, and everyone else in Vancouver that we know, had been ringing us all day.

It turns out that if you haven't got any credit on your phone in Canada, you can't recieve incoming calls.

Because of the way that the UK system works concerning mobile phones, it didn't even occur to us that we needed to keep the phone topped up.

It turned out that the hotel we were supposed to be staying at had only kept the rooms we had booked until 5pm, and it was already nearly 9pm.

My dad wandered up and down the road while me, Aliya, Talib and Majeed went across to the sea.
We walked onto the deck there and saw a few people fishing. Majeed wanted to stay till he saw someone catch something, so we stayed and watched and started to wander what it would be like to fish for ourselves.

After a while we found out that our room had indeed been taken already so we set off looking for somewhere else to sleep.

As had been experience for us the past few days, reservations are everything. Not only were we going around looking for somewhere to sleep, people we knew in Vancouver were doing the same thing too.

We must have been driving around for about an hour and a half until we got a phone call with some good news. We travelled across the bridge to get to North Vancouver, and quickly realised that were were in downtown Vancouver. There were cars and pedestrians everwhere, and we got lost very quickly.
Eventually we ended up on Robson Street, where our hotel was, and drove round looking for somewhere to park. My dad went to the front desk, got us booked in, parked the car and we all dragged our luggage up to our rooms. We had finally arrived.

We went downstairs to the restaurant that was just outside and had some food there. It was ok, but it was enough to quell our hunger for the evening. We got back to our rooms, and all fell alseep.

Finally, we were in Vancouver.

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18th August 2006 - Day Nine

Today, I woke up in Banff.

What a view. Outside were the wonderous mountains, lined with trees and topped with crisp white snow.

The plan for today was to visit Lake Louise, and then travel to Kamloops for the night.

We made it to Lake Louise, and it was an amazing site, as ever. This time was made different by the fact that we went on the canoes, and paddled up the lake. My sister and I took one canoe and my brother and Muj took another. We got a fair bit up the lake before we had to turn back.

After that we headed off for the Columbian Ice fields. We stopped at Saskatchewan Crossing for a breather, then carried on up the hill. My dad has a fear of heights, so my mum took over the driving but before long we noticed that we were very low on fuel. We stopped to discuss our options and decided to drive back to The Crossing, fuel up a bit, the drive back to Lake Louise and continue across to Kamloops and try and stop there for the night. This, in total, lost us about 2 hours which would have been useful towards the end of the day...

We continued driving down Highway 1 and after about 3 or 4 hours we ended up driving through a town called Ravelstoke. Since it was quite late we thought that we'd look for somewhere to stay the night but as usual, everything was booked.

We went to a small restaurant for some food and just happened to be served by one of the women that works at the information desk for Ravelstoke. She gave us a list of hotels that we could ring and we eventually found a hotel a little way out from Ravelstoke that had a room available.

We finished our pizza there, and then headed off to the hotel that gave us keys to a sort of loft conversion. There was a double bed and 2 bunk beds in the main room, and 2 seperate rooms off to the sides. These side rooms had their own TV, bed, and toilet, and one of them had a second shower. Of course, I was stuffed into the room that didn't have the shower, but it was good to get a bit of privacy, and to get away from my brother's snoring!

Thus ends day 2 of the journey from Edmonton to Vancouver.

17th August 2006 - Day Seven

Well, today we leave for Vancouver!

And a milestone has been hit with Sadeeq's Tablet PC.

When I arrived here, he had deleted a file on his tablet that prevented it from booting up. I fixed that, but then there was the problem of all the bad software that had been installed on the computer.

Over the past week I had been trying to reinstall Windows XP Tablet Edition on his tablet, but have been hitting brick wall after brick wall with things like incompatible versions, impossible upgrades, missing files and missing discs, but this morning something magical happened:

We had so far installed Windows XP Home Edition on the tablet, as for some reason we were not able to boot the tablet edition CD. Anyway, we had got as far as allowing the tablet to restart after it set up the tablet edition installation, we left it overnight and hoped that it would install by itself. I woke up this morning to see it saying that it was missing a file. I started searching the CD and the hard drive for the file, but couldn't find it. I remembered seeing something about a second CD, so I copied the contents onto a USB drive and stuck it into the laptop. I search for the file on the usb drive and there it was! I was so happy because that's the first time it had asked for a file from the second disc all week! I left the installation to run while I got all my things together, repacked my bag and had breakfast. Sadeeq then took the tablet into his room and started reinstalling all the programs. Before we left he had already installed the tablet's digital pen driver, and some of the other necessary things such as the tablet's side push buttons and the touch sensative buttons on the face of the tablet.

Muj had eventually agreed to come with us. He wasn't too sure about it as he wanted to go to a concert that was happening while we were away on our trip. It was either the trip or the concert and he was actually getting a lot of pressure from everyone to go, even though he wanted to stay.
I'm not sure if he's going to enjoy it as much as he would if he actually wanted to come, but I'm sure that being with us will make it better for him.

12:52am:
So, the rest of the day was pretty interesting. Only real thing that we did to day was visit the Tyrell Museum, which is supposedly the largest dinosaur museum in the world. And it feels it too, because there was a lot to see, and a lot of dinosaurs. Even went into detail about the trees and how they affected all the animals through the ages. They even had real cockroaches, a real scorpion, and a real tarantula! Muj was really scared of it, even though it was in a glass box. Was really cool looking at the Cockroaches, because I've never seen on so close before. They are kinda gross, though..

Most of the rest of the journey was spend on the road with a quick stop over in Calgary for some Quizno's Subs (Mmmmm...).

The plan for tomorrow is that we go to Lake Louise, probably go up in the cable car and maybe even go to the Columbia Ice Fields, which is going to be very cold...

Lost of pictures were taken, so I should have them up on Flickr sometime soon.

Have a few pictures from inside the mouth of the World's Largest Dinosaur (replica).

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16th August 2006 - Day Six

Today we went to get a haircut.

Well, we all went but only Muj, Taa and Tal got their hair cut.

We went all the way back to St. Albert, where Yasmin aunty and the family used to live, because one of Sadeeq's friends works in a hairdressers there.

Her name is Keri, and she's the girl on my Flickr that had the mendhi tattoo done.

We waited there for them to finish, and Tal got his hair done there too. It didn't really look that nice, but he really liked it, so I guess that's all that counts.

After that we went home, grabbed something to eat, and headed off to the cinema to see Miami Vice. It's such a good film, and I suggest you watch it.

Tomorrow we leave for our journey to Vancouver.

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14th August 2006 - Day Five

TIme for some shopping!

Today we went to South Edmonton Common. It's a massive complex that has tons of outlet stores in it. I went here last year and bought a lot of clothes.

We split off into two groups and I went off to Best Buy to look for a travel adaptor. I didn't find one, mainly because I was playing around with all the computers and surround systems and things that were there. It's like Dixons but bigger and better. Sooo much technology there, but nothing beats the Fry's in Texas I went to a few years ago :)

After failing to find the travel adaptor in Best Buy we headed over to Old Navy, as that was our meeting point. The other half of the group hadn't turned up so we waited for them. And waited. And waited. I got bored and started looking at jeans and found a really good pair for less than $30. I snapped them up straight away. Maj and Taa were contemplating which shirts to get, and Muj found a good hooded zippy top but wasn't sure whether he should get it.

We were still waiting for the rest of the family, and I was getting bored hanging around in a clothes shop, so I crossed the street to Staples in search of a travel adaptor. As before I couldn't find one, so I wandered around the store for a bit before going back to Old Navy.

When I got there, I found out that about 2 minutes after I had gone to Staples, the rest of the family arrived there. Typical! We all decided we were peckish, so we went off in search of food.

We finally decided on some McDonalds, and so we all sat down and had our sandwiches and burgers there. I thought I'd try a Crispy Chicken sandwich, but didn't find it too filling, or too tasty.

We then went off back home. The rest of the family had bought several different items, and Taa had also bought a new pair of shoes. I had just got those jeans, but they are nice.

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13th August 2006 - Day Four

Ah, back to West Edmonton Mall. This time, for some fun though!

We had been invited to GalaxyLand in The Mall by Dilu aunty, so along we all went.

I decided to take some anti-histamine as I had had a few mosquito bites from the barbecue at the weekend, so I took that before we left.

We started the day with a few holes of mini golf in which the 8 of us were slip into 2 groups. Talib won from our group and I came in something like 3rd or 4th, but it was a fun time.

After that I started to feel sleepy. I couldn't figure out why, but when we got into GalaxyLand, I fell right asleep on one of the benches.

I wasn't sure what was wrong and just put it down to not getting enough sleep. I decided to go off and get some food, so had a mini fillet from KFC, but still didn't feel too good. I went back inside looking for everyone else and I found Dilu aunty, who was with Adam and Zahra. We then went to the food court to get some proper food and my mum, dad and Rubina appeared there after about 20 minutes. Dilu aunty and her group went back into GalaxyLand, but I stayed there, falling asleep on the table using two of my own, newly bought T-Shirts and pillows. After sleeping for a good 20 or 30 minutes, and waiting for my parents to get back from their little walk, I realised that the reason I had been so tired was because of the anti-histamine tablets I took at the beginning of the day. For some reason, I thought they would help with the mosquito bites, but in hindsight, that was a bad idea. I drank a bottle of water and felt much better for it.

A little while later the kids came into the food court and we decided to leave.

12th August 2006 - Day Three

Woohoo! West Edmonton Mall!!

Well, I say that as if we spent the whole day there, and visited tons of shops, and bought loads of stuff, but the truth is that we didn't.

Instead we went shopping for clothes for my aunt, mum and sister, and er, that was it.

My brother and I decided to go off to The Source and look for UK to US plug converters, but we couldn't find any.

My dad had said that they'd all be in The Bay so we went there, and looked, and looked, but we couldn't find them.

We sat outside for about 10 minutes before we ventured off the find them.

Suddenly I got a call on my phone, it was Aliya asking us where we were, we eventually met up with the rest of them to be told that that one minute phone call had cost $7! Wowzers!

We then went off the eat some food at the food court while I convinced my dad that buying a phone sim
card would be a good idea if anything like that happened again. But then the sim cards were about $60, so even that started to look unappealing.

We came home, tired, when Sadeeq suggested that we go to a bar in Whyte Avenue; apparently one of the places in Edmonton that's buzzing at night, thanks to being very close to the university.

We got into Sadeeq's friend Brady's car, and went off to Whyte Avenue. The people we were supposed to meet hadn't turned up and besides, both Sadeeq and I had forgotten our IDs.

We met a few more of his friends there, and we headed back to their house to watch Coyote Ugly and eat some Mac and Cheese (although that wasn't planned). It was nice being in an environment like that, although I was more interested in Coyote Ugly than, er, whatever they were talking about.

Sadeeq and I went back home in Brady's car, I konked out and Sadeeq went back to the bar with ID.

So, not the most interesting of days, although it's always nice to meet new people.

One of Sadeeq's friends is kinda nice, too...

11th August 2006 - Day Two

Today was a better day. Got a relatively good night's sleep, and my head was feeling a lot better.

Although the plan was to at least do something today, being san car and plus stormy weather wasn't going to help the situation much.

Most of the day was spent on the XBox (I'm missing my 360 so much right now), but we did venture out in the rain to go down to Sobey's and pick up some supplies, such as pizzas, sugar, crisps and peanuts. Came back home and watched a bit of TV, went on the computer a bit (Submachine 2 is SO hard!) and generally lazed about. By the time 10pm rolled around, I was pooped, still struggling with the time difference (it would have been about 5am in the UK).

Tomorrow should be a better day, Yasmin aunty has a computer related problem at work, so it's Shaf to the rescue! And we should be able to take their MPV around with us, at least have a form of transport in a part of the world where everywhere is about a half hour drive away from everywhere else.

Just puts into perspective how small England really is.

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10th August 2006 - Day One

Wow, what an interesting start to the trip!

Some terrorists decided that they wanted to blow some planes up, problem is that the British police got to them before they got to the planes.

Not that bad a thing, you might think, but this put all UK airports on high alert, meaning that NO items were to be taken onto the plane as hand luggage except boarding passes and passports.

Nothing...

We tried 'sneaking' on some food, a few drinks, and a few of my magazines, but there was no chance of that happening as all of that had to be throw out.

Past check-in, and the horendous queues in Gatwick, we went through into the departure lounge, first going through the mandatory security checks; Shoes off, belts off, jackets off. It felt like Washington D.C all over again.

Past the security checks and into the departure lounge, I see the boarding displays show that our plane's gate is closing soon. I run off to tell them that we're coming, only to run out of breath about 1/4 of the way there and have to walk it all the way. Turns out that it was for nothing, as the gate hadn't even opened yet.

Then came the showstopper: We had lost our bording passes.

This could have put a stop to the whole journey, but fortunately someone found them before we had to board, which was VERY lucky.

Being the really bad flier that I am, I really couldn't stomach the flight. I slept now and then, watched some in flight entertainment, but generally had my head down trying not to throw up. The 10 hours could not have gone any faster.

Touchdown in Calgary, and it was as if nothing had happened. Went through customs, collected our bags, and headed off outside. Salim uncle was waiting for us, and we piled our bags into, and onto, his MPV.

A quick stop off for food and some tylenol, and off on the 3 hour car ride to Edmonton. Got here, had a bit to eat, and got straight onto the internet!

End of day one.. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

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Not USA, but it's still North America..

So, today came crunch time.

Given the fact that we're already a week into August, a trip around America was probably not a good idea.

So, instead, we're going to Canada!!

Edmonton, naturally. So at least it's not all a loss. We'll have 3 weeks to go around and explore The West coast of Canada, and this time we'll go to places like Whistler and Victoria. I might even be able to twist me parents' arms and see if we can go down to Seattle to at least see the Microsoft buildings. That would be SO cool (do they do tours?).

So, as I said, not all is lost, at least we'll be with family and it's a bit of a relief that we won't be on the road almost all the time.

Check back for more news soon!

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A sign of things to come

Well, the idea behind having yet another blog, is to collate all my experience in all the cities that we plan on visiting over the summer, if it happens.

The trip will be pretty complicated, and we'll only have a month, which isn't a long time to visit America.

We'll probably start in Edmonton, go across to Vancouver, down past Seattle (Microsoft, yay!), then to San Francisco (Apple, yay!), down to Los Angeles, across to Las Vegas, then off across to the other side of America and up the east cost passing through Washington D.C., New York finally ending up in Toronto, maybe going to Montreal, and then finally back in Edmonton and back to England.

It will be a difficult journey, and already speaking to the Americans I know, they've said it'll be hard to fit into a month, but I feel that we'll be able to do it.
We'll have between 2 and 4 drivers on board at all times, but then we will be looking after 6+ kids (including me...) at the same time.

Even if we have to cut the journey short, I still think that we'll still enjoy America.
If anyone has any comments about sites or ideas about journey plans, let me know.

If it does go ahead, I want it to be the best experience possible.

Shafiq.