Living with Canucks: Junk Vultures

Saturday morning saw the great Garage Sale of Bow Ridge Drive. I inadvertently kept on calling it a Car Boot Sale and was confusing the don't know whats out of most Canadian folk (just for the record, Brits tend to sell all the crap from their garage out of the boot (ahem, trunk - sorry) of their car whilst parked in a field in the middle of nowhere - this way your neighbours don't get to see what rubbish you've accumulated and hoarded over the years).

So we were up at the crack of dawn to go and plaster our advertising signs across Cochrane, and at 8 o'clock on the dot the junk vultures were arriving - haggling over a dollar for this piece of crap or 50 cents for that broken, utterly useless, pre 1976 wad of garbage in the corner. Brina was all very gung ho, and we'd made about $100 by 9 o'clock (I was begining to like this garage sale business).

As you can see, Brina had got every piece of crap we own lined up on the tables out front, and the bleery eyed wife in the photo is sticking prices on stuff at 6.30am.

It was quite a fun way to meet certain characters of Cochrane (and there seem to be plenty of them) - an old couple from Stretford came along, and a woman from Helsby popped by (both places in alarmingly close proximity to the place where I grew up in the UK - about as close as Calgary is to Cochrane - if not closer) and another couple from the Ribble Valley, not a very good advert for the North West of England as we're all fleeing, but a good ad for this neck of the woods though.

It's been a rather quiet week other than purging the crap from the house - we eventually made a whopping $350 by the way, so a productive day on the whole. The rest of the week has seen a few stints out on the bike - headed over Highwood pass with Brad midweek, all was nice and quiet on the pass, although some hefty forest fires in BC and Montana were wreaking havoc with the views as you could barely see the mountains when descending down the other side. More riding should be had this week, in the somber period before resuming work next week (urrgh), and Brina is keen to head off for a bit more camping, so we taking the tent out to Kananaskis and Banff for a few days this week too (Think I'll sneek the bike with me).

Football season has started for all but Man Utd - so perhaps I'll just leave that topic for now.

From some of the last posts, I'd neglected to recant that we'd cruised through Arches National Park where there are endless stacks of crazyily piled rocks (It must have taken ages for them to balance all these things in place!!!)

And there are arches everywhere - hence the name of the park. We took a few of the photos from the car as it was so bloody hot - but in this piccie you can see a host of tourists braving the furness like temps to go and get a bit "hands on" with the one of the arches.