Blair's Blog

It’s a beautiful day after a few rainy days and we are on the Bow River – rafting with Uncle Brian. Steven, Mark and Alyssa headed out with me and we met Brian at Ft Calgary. We dropped our van off then drove to Bowness park to launch the zodiac.

We’ve just got on the river and here are the first couple of pictures.

UPDATE: Sunday the 17th.

Here is a map of the route we took down the river:

We were on the water sometime before 1:30pm from Bowness Park and out of the river about 4:20 at the confluence of the Elbow and the Bow. We covered about 18 km in that 3 hours.  Compared to other trips down the Bow in previous years, that is really fast. Usually we have done the river later in the summer and that distance would take about 5 hours. The Bow was still pretty high and turbid with spring runoff, lots of the little islands (gravel bars, really) were under water.  In particular, the big gravel bar at the Elbow wasn’t there and the water was moving fast – we nearly overshot our landing spot, which would have been a pain!

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Well, not a lot of fame, but some! Brenda has been on the news several times in the past 5 or 6 weeks as the press speculates about whether the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will make an appearance at the Aero Space Museum of Calgary. The speculation is all fueled by the fact that Kate’s grandfather was an instructor at #37 SFTS, one of the BCATP flight training schools during WWII. The museum building was the #37 SFTS drill hall during the war.

Brenda has been interviewed for print and television about a half-dozen times and has been on local, regional and national TV newscasts. Even the UK press have talked with her! She is quickly using up her 15 minutes of fame. Brenda is due to be interviewed by Peter Mansbridge for the CBC National news on Thursday evening (7 July 2011).

I’ve even managed to get on the news, too. On Monday I was helping to take the masking off of the just-repainted Lancaster bomber, when the news crew came through. Unfortunately, I appear to have squandered my few seconds of fame by getting my backside on TV.

If you’d like to see the full segment, Global TV Calgary has the video on-line. You’ll need to select “News Hour” from the list on the left hand side of the page. The show you need to watch is the “News Hour” broadcast from 4 July 2011. Brenda’s segment begins about 4:45 into the video (at about 6:05 local time in the top right of the video clip). They seem to keep the files up for about 3 months so if you wait til after mid-October, you’ll miss it!

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Three years and 1 day after we lost Shadow to cancer, we have a new addition to the family. This is Chloe, she is a brindle french bulldog born on 2 January 2011. We just picked her up this evening.

It will be really nice to have a dog in the family once again. This picture is of Mark and Chloe when he and Brenda first saw the dog yesterday. We’ll get some more pictures up in the next few days.

… got any puppy training tips for us?

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