Leslie Sunday, May 18, 2008
We’re really enjoying this beautiful campground and the opportunity to work with our technical equipment. The campground has an excellent high speed WIFI internet connection so we’ve used the opportunity here to catch up on outside work while enjoying the view out our windows. (I’ve even gotten some client work done and sent out.)
This morning we spent what seemed like forever trying to set up Skype-the voice over internet telephone service. Although we know many people who use Skype routinely, we weren’t able to achieve satisfactory voice quality despite attempting several different microphones and sound cards. We haven’t figured out why we weren’t successful but we’re guessing that the internet service here, although fast for a campground, really isn’t of sufficient quality for good voice transmissions. (Hey Julie & Gary in Australia, if we had succeeded we had plans to call you regardless of the hour! Skype costs only 2.4 cents per minute to Australia.) We’ll solve this dilemma later.
After calculating and recalculating we decided to buy Canadian National Parks annual passes. Basically it turns out that if you use the passes for 6 days you break even on an annual pass. We think we’ll need a pass for five days at this end of the trip so we decided that we should go ahead and buy the annual pass – that way we won’t ever have to consider whether it is worth going through a national park - and we may visit a national park on the way back south in September. Canadian national park daily entrance fees are expensive – around $19.00 for both of us. We learned that if we had an annual pass we’d also get a discount at the hot springs. That was the deciding factor making our calculation to five days.
We spent the afternoon at the hot springs. Radium Hot Springs are a lot like Glenwood Spring in Colorado – thermal springs bubbling up from the earth create extremely hot pools of water. The hot tub was between 103 - 110 degrees; that’s too hot for me. The "hot" pool was in the 90's. While I really enjoyed the hot pool, I like Glenwood Springs better because the pool at Radium Hot Springs is never deeper than about 3 feet. At Glenwood Springs one could actually swim in the pool. We didn’t go in the cool pool here but it has a diving board and looks like an ordinary swimming pool. I did put my feet in the cool pool; it wasn’t that cold. I’m sure the hot springs would be delightful in the winter.
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On the way back to the campground from the Hot Springs I saw this view into the valley. The valley was destroyed by fire in the late 1800s and is now verdant farm country.
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By the way, because we were going to the hot springs, I left the good camera at home. I took these pictures with my little Nikon 7.1 megapixel pocket camera. When I downloaded the day’s pictures I found this last picture taken on March 17th at Winter Park, Colorado.
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As we had dinner outside at our picnic table tonight we saw a family at a nearby campsite playing a tossing game. I commented to Robert that it looked as if they were playing quoits. I hadn’t seen quoits in many years. Robert had never heard of quoits. I explained that we played quoits as children. Quoits is similar to horseshoes but you have to actually hit the ring. I went on-line tonight to educate those of you who have never played quoits. http://www.quoitfactory.com/quoit-faq.html Some other sources indicate that playing quoits actually precedes the birth of Christ. There is a national quiots association. We had rubber quoits but some of the "official" sources say that metal quoits are common. I think one would not want metal projectiles in a game for children! As I remember it, it was a perfect camping game. This website says that a quoit board lasts for 30+ years. That’s a good thing considering the current cost. http://www.quoits.info/
We’re pulling out of here tomorrow headed to Baniff. We have reservations at a campground at Banff with full hook-ups.
Looking forward to hearing from all of you,
until next time,
Leslie
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