A white Christmas

Our housemate's kids were all at their Father's this year for Christmas so she asked me to invite people I knew over to share a turkey dinner. So I ended up just asking the people I work with, and most of them came.

A weekend in Fairmont Hot Springs.

The title makes it sound like we spent an entire weekend sitting in a pool of hot water. However, the entire town is called Fairmont Hot Springs. We spent only about 1 hour on one night in the hot springs. (Which are not as nice as Moree, they're pretty dilapidated actually).

It's a moose!

Sneaky Snow Trip to Banff

We spent Tuesday night near Calgary, before driving to Golden on Wednesday.
We stopped in Banff on the way through, and did the Tower Mountain walk. It was pretty good, but only had interrupted views over Banff. We didn't like Banff itself, because it was too touristy for us. But it was nice to stroll there for a half day.

Finally Fernie Locals - sort of

The walk beside the river in Fernie

Well, I have finally had time to get another blog post up. We have moved twice and our current house has no internet just yet. So that makes it difficult to blog. We have found it pretty hard to find a good, cheap place to live, so have settled for good. The ski hill has 70% returning staff from last year, and so jobs are also in short supply. But hopefully we will find something to sustain us.

Hay bale tag and a skunk: Calgary

We arrived in Calgary last Wednesday afternoon and Wayne met us at the airport. Luckily he had the week off work, so we didn't have to wait at the airport all afternoon. When we got to their house we helped out with digging potatoes and Brandon helped with some carpentry stuff.

There was sushine!

Week one in Vancouver: A real Canadian Hockey Game!

Hockey game in Vancouver

Hello from Canada. We made it, we survived our 24+ hours in transit. And as our week ends we are just starting to feel human again. Because our time is kind of open ended we haven't run in full throttle like we normally do. On Thursday we caught the train into Vancouver and got ourselves Social Security Numbers and then spent the day there. That night we met Murray, one of our hosts, for a "real" Candian hockey game! Calgary Vs Vancouver, it was pretty good, even though I had no idea what was going on most of the time. 

Country life

We've been staying with Bradon's parents for a couple weeks now, while we build a garage for them. I thought I would share a few choice photos from our time here before we head to Canada early next month.

Broughton Island shark diving

A little while ago we finally got around to diving at Broughton Island, which is just out of Nelson Bay. It was probably one of our favourite dives so far. We went with Let's Go Adventures and the staff were great. The toilet on the boat even worked!

The island is about an hour boat trip from the marina, and we had a beautiful sunny day for it. The two sites we were taken to were North Rock and Looking glass. Both were beautiful and filled with grey nurse sharks and friendly port jackson sharks, among many other fish. The visibility in looking glass was stunning at about 15m. We would definitely do this dive again!

Video is the best format for diving, so you can view our video from the day here!

7 Days In Cairns: How to cram it all in!

Hand feed these dudes at Hartley's crocodile adventures!

Last October we spent about a week and a half driving around in far north Queensland (as it's called, even though there's more north than that). Yes, I know, it's been months since I last put anything up. But I had figured no one much was reading it.
As usual, I over planned and had almost every day stuffed with things to do. The weather ended up changing a few plans, because it rained almost every day we were there. Here's a rough run down on what we did, and what you can do too.