canadacalling

I haven't yet SEEN any moose, but i ate one! Moose isn't a meat thats farmed out here, which quite surprised me, so you either need to know someone who hunts, or a local butcher that may get the odd moose here and there from a local hunter. Michelle got a chunk from a hunter she knows. As she'd never cooked it before, and neither of us are particularly established kitchen masters, it was an experiment. Turned out pretty good!

Chunk of moose meat (this was 2lb 2oz)
carrots
green beans
dry mustard
salt
black pepper
bay leaves
stock
tomatoes - fresh, quartered... or from a tin. whatever

preheat oven to 350
drain the blood from the meat. Place meat on plate and rub in some dry mustard all over. Next, sprinkle lightly with salt and dust with black pepper. Place in glass oven dish.
Add carrots, tomatoes and green beans to the dish around the meat, and pour in about a cupful of stock mix.
Chuck in a few Bay leaves for good measure. Apparently, you shouldnt eat the bay leaves.
Put a sheet of tin foil over the top.

Whack it in the oven for about 1hr15. We did it for 1hr30 and it was med/well done.

Remove from oven, allow to cool whilst making pepper sauce/ potato/ whatever else you want with it. Carve and serve!

Carved up, with the roasted vegetables all ready to plate up!

Some peppers would have gone well in the dish, however we didnt have any to hand, so we went without.

so what does it taste like?? it tastes 'gamey' - the bay leaves no doubt took some of the edge off that, so maybe if we had left it seasoned for a while prior to cooking it would have been even better?? It tasted like a mix of pheasant and beef. Not bad at all!

above photo taken at Mount Robson, which is actually outside of Jasper national park, but thats neither here nor there...

So we stayed at the Pocahontas Lodges, which was about 25 minutes drive from the town of Jasper, very nice, all log cabins, and strangely, i think the employee's may have been used in the film The Deliverance. Several times i thought i could hear the sound of duelling banjo's in the background This caused a bit of worry when my creditcard wouldnt authorise, i thought they may have tried to keep me to add an extra strand to the dna...

we got chalet #46. The bikers reading this will understand its relevence.

so Michelle dropped me off at the slopes for a bit of boarding. I was a bit nervous, it was abit like 'first day at school' but i decided that i didnt need/couldnt afford lessons. so i watched a few people for a couple of minutes then decided i could do this. I strapped myself to the board, which proved quite tricky as it was determined to fuck off down the hill by itself... then i slid down the slope towards the chair lift. on my ass. and crashing thru the orange fencing into the 'school' area.

ok! so perhaps another go at that, i got off the board and back to the top of the school slope area. Michelle said she'd be back in a minute as she was going to move the car and get her camera. No problem, i figured i wasnt going ver far too fast.

within seconds, i managed to glide, upright, back down the nursery slope and to the chair lift! well, may as well get on this thing then. Lesson number 1. getting on the chair lift. i was on the chair lift with a local ski-er, who asked me how boarding compared with ski-ing... 'your asking the wrong person this is the first time i even seen snow!' she seemed quite surprised but assumed i'd had lessons earlier in the day... 'lessons? no, i just ended up on this chair lift'
Lesson #2. getting off the chair lift......

anyway, all went well. Not content with sliding all the way down the mountain on my ass just once, i ended up back in the chair lift for another crack (excuse the pun) at it. My butt was bruised, i had to bail out at speed after getting a good run going (thats comparative of course) and my arms, wrists, shoulders all ache from picking myself back up!

a bit of miscommunication meant that i'd hitched a ride back to Jasper town, to save Michelle a bit of a drive, meanwhile she'd headed up to the slopes at the end of the day to come get me - no phone signal up there so she had the worry of seeing the place closing and no reports of strange englishmen lost up the slopes, and i had the worry of becoming elk fodder. eventually i managed to get hold of her so we met up back in Jasper. Phew!

Mean looking elk... the silent killer

So the snow eventually stopped falling in PG and we headed out to Jasper National park, Alberta, for a couple of days. Lots of mountains, tree's and animals! We got to see some wolves, elk, and weird hybrid mountain goatsheep things. no moose yet, and no bears.

the animal kill rate in Jasper last year was:
wolves 0
goatsheep 0 (but accounted for several written off cars)
bears 1
elk 54

its official! elk are more likely to kill ya than bears!

i didnt find this out until AFTER i'd chased a herd around in a vain attempt to catch one...

ermmm.... ooops

yep, its proper stuck...

still, we managed to catch Bryan Adams, apparently he's doing much less studio work and touring these days, and spends his time pulling cars outta the snow instead.

hugely funny seeing him take off into the distance, at speed, along the icy roads... with that truck spinning up and sliding like crazy! damn, i want his job!

although he kept talking about how the Honda cars usually have a handy clamp hole in the front subframe but this one didnt have one, so it must be an american built one. i didnt have the heart to tell him that it was a Nissan.

So aircanada called to say that they have my missing luggaage, not only that, but they were going to deliver it to the door for me.

And it is here!

Thank fook for that )

Cant grumble at that for service really. We knew it would be somewhere in Canada so it was only a matter of time.

Its still snowing now. I stepped out into the back garden, and promptly sank thru the snow down to my knees. about 14" fallen since landing in PG.

We had booked a few days in Jasper from tomorrow (tuesday) but have had to cancel as we dont know yet if we're going to be able to get out of PG!

Whoaa there! One hour later, and it seems the plane must have been diverted to Alaska! Nope, this is Prince George post snowstorm!

Luggage now missing. Thats right! Travel half way across the world, and luggage fine... travel internally just an hour or so, and the snowboard bag is missing. Also containing all my cold weather clothes and some photographic equipment too...

Monday morning
Vancouver airport. Catching a plane on the way to Prince George. It was supposed to be sunday, but due to adverse weather conditions, we had to be rescheduled. I use the term plane loosely, it does have a wing on each side. Luggage all loaded on, and everything simply wonderful! AirCanada seem to have excelled!

This was pretty cool. a steam powered clock. Every half hour or so, it would play pipe music. Even cooler, we could sit by Starbucks.

Note in the background is Whistler mountain.

Sunday morning gave us the chance to have a mooch around the city. We found this bull that had fallen into a huge pot of molten metal and then been allowed to cool down, creating this lifelike statue.

this is Michelle. Probably related to Celine Dion somewhere along the line. )

Landed in Vancouver on saturday after a pretty reasonable 10hr flight with AirCanada. No problemswith luggage and everything went very smoothly!

This is the Sheraton hotel, which is very nice. We could see it from our hotel.

so here's the city centre webcam, a shot supposedly taken at noon (check the embedded time on the pic) on thursday 28th.

A central hub of activity!

not too bad at all! when i was booking my flights a few weeks ago, it had dropped to -40c... brrrrrrrrr!!!!

Ok, so its a few months into the new year. And its not really a long term blog either! I just started this one to keep a documentary/rockumentary for my forthcoming trip to Canada.

Some of you reading may well read my other blog, under a different pseudonym ;o)

So here's the plan... i'm off to Canada. Flying from Heathrow terminal 3 on Saturday 1st March, landing in Vancouver later that day. I'll be spending the night in Vancouver before flying off to a small town about 500 miles north.

I'm armed with snowboarding equipment, a pretty large holdall, a new digital camera and some books.
And a keen sense of humour!

I'll make sure i get photographs taken with various celebrity canada-folk ;o)

There's a webcam situated in the town, which also takes a snapshot everyday at 11:56am (localtime). Every day i've looked, not a lot has been happening... So one of my missions is to make sure theres something worthy of the daily snapshot ;o)