Super Fun Adventure Times: train

Henry is feeling better and can contribute to the blog today!

We took it easy today and visited our friend James (who was at Queen's the same time as us) in his hometown of Burnham-on-Crouch, which is about an hour east of London by train. We arrived around noon and had some tea and biscuits at his parents' shop. Then we walked along the river and saw lots of boats. It's near the sea so we were happy to feel the sea air again. Also, it was nice to get out of the busyness of London and to the cleaner air. We happened to visit on market day so we passed a lot of stalls selling fruits, vegetables, fish and other stuff too.

We had fish and chips for lunch and at James' suggestion, we tried some curry sauce on fries, which was very good. It was really fun to catch up with James and to see where he was living now. We took the train back to London and had a pizza for dinner. Then, we went to a Tesco store to buy some candy to take home. We also got some "shrimp cocktail" chips. We thought it would be like the Asian prawn crackers but they were cocktail sauce flavoured instead of shrimp flavoured!

Tomorrow, we are going to meet with James in London and visit Greenwich Observatory / Prime Meridian and the Tower of London! We also already arranged tickets to see Kensington Palace and the London Eye on Thursday.

Day 8 -- Calgary, AB

Google Earth measurements (straight line between locations)
Distance from Vancouver: 673 km
Distance from Kingston: 2887 km

Today we went to the Calgary Stampede! Yay!! Unfortunately, the weather was really bad and it rained a lot. We took the C-Train (Calgary's Light Rail Transit system) to the Stampede area. The C-Train is not automated like the Skytrain and it runs on the street so it obeys traffic lights etc. as well. One cool thing is that the downtown area of the C-Train is free to ride on.

Our rodeo tickets also gave us admission to the rest of the fairgrounds so we walked around first. It was very similar to the PNE except with way more cowboys and cowgirls. Also a lot more animals too! Like the PNE, there was a marketplace area where people tried to sell us magic towels or other junk. There was lots of junk food and raffle draws/lotteries. It rained before the rodeo so everything was wet! We were about 45 minutes early but the rain had stopped so it was not so bad. But once the rodeo actually started, so did the rain! And it only got worse and worse!! After an hour, we were too cold and wet to enjoy watching the show from our seats so we moved inside to dry off, get hot chocolate, and watch it from screens inside the grandstand. Our cowboy hats were advertised to be "water resistant" (they were made of 100% wool) and they did their job well! The rodeo was three hours long in total but we left about an hour early to make sure we could get back to our hotel before the rain storm got any worse.

The rodeo show was pretty fun to watch. We had caught a section of an "Intro to Rodeo" talk that morning which kind of explained the rules but we were not able to appreciate the finer points of each event such as the scoring system. But it was fun to watch cowboys try to stand on unhappy animals or chase calves down and lasso them. The top score that day was something like 4.3 seconds to lasso the calf and tie up its legs! Amazing!

Also, the Stampede seems to really like their fireworks. A whole ton of them went off at appropriate points during the introductions!

Tomorrow will be our last day in Calgary!