today we all fell...... a long way down at Niagra Falls

Good evening. Christmas Day was fabulous.... it snowed enough to be an official white Christmas, we switched pressies, Michelle cooked up a storm for lunch, although we only managed to eat about a 'shower's' worth, we went for a walk around the suburb and then ate desert at around 5:30 in the evening. Then we all sat down to watch The Dark Knight movie. Which everyone managed to do successfully except Ashleigh and I. We successfully snoozed instead. Jess wants to make sure that you know we had yummy Dairy Queen ice-cream cake for desert (with chocolate biscuit crumbe in the middle).

So today, in recovery mode from Christmas Day, we headed to Niagra Falls. Luckily, they are only about 1 hour from here, so it was a fun drive. Things we saw on the way included ice wine vineyards (where they make wine out of grapes that are frozen in the first chills), lots of industrial landscapey type stuff including housing that looked like it mustn't heat very well in the winter and the canals from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. "I gotta mule, her name is Sal...15 miles on the Erie Canal. She's a good ol' worker and a good ole pal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal."

Things that we now know about Niagra Falls that we didn't know before are:

• it isn't a rain day, it is mist from the Falls (but we sure wouldn't let the kids out of class to play in it). Ashleigh's feet turned pink and froze as her sneakers battled with melting snow and mist/rain.

• it is hard to stand on edges covered in ice, but the icicles are very pretty.
• there is a LOT of water that flows over the falls each day.
• it is where the Canadians fought off the Americans in the 1800s and had them surrender (don't often hear that, do we?) - thank Nathan for that piece of history.
  
• the falls in american (the American Falls) are smaller than those in Canada.
  
• It is weird to watch cars drive on the other side of the falls and think that is was a completely different country that you were looking at.

• There is a Tim Horton's shop there (like just about everywhere else), which is a bit like a dome coffee shop mixed with a muzz buzz, but coffee only costs about $1.40 a cup.
• it doen't matter if it is only mist, it is still really really really cold.

After visiting the Falls, we went to a little town called Niagra on the Lake. We looked in lots of shop windows and bought jam for brekky. It was cold too. But rather than go on about the cold, we could celebrate that at one stage it was 2 degrees. yay! :)




We're home again now. We probably won't add to the blog now for another week. Tomorrow we are off to the shops to post postcards (are you reading this Rebecca?), participate in post-Christmas sales (Ash is looking for only in Canadia converses (gym boots) to spend her present money on), and go to an ice hockey game in the evening. The next morning we are off to Blue Mountain ski resort for about 5 days of pain, torture and.....snow/cold.

Christmas Day

This is a really big snowflake.
OK. It may not look like it, but it was really big when it landed on JJs sleeve. It's Christmas Day so I should go do something more christmassy like have a shower rather than do stuff on the mac.

2nd Day In CANADA!!! =D yays

it's Ash now! :D
so today, we donned our new snow gear and...
went tobogganing! (thats right- we can spell it, too!)
after waking up late, we walked to Jess's school and braved the tobogganing slopes of destiny!
well, not quite... but still ... :)
so just in case you didn't know::
when you go tobogganing, you have, like a board-ish thing underneath you
(kinda like aboogie board but thinner and with handles)
and you run and then you slide down the snowy slope!
and that's uh... it. ^^
so yeah, there was tobogganing and stacking it and snow fights a-plenty.

this is jess: (just letting you know)
anyways
its been great having ash here, i cant believe that you guys let her go away for christmas to come and see me! =D
anyways back too the tobogganing
ash was amazing
it was like she did it before
but the best thing was she went down this hill that had a huge jump right at the end,
but the funny thing was that she completely missed it!
i was laughing so hard!! xD
nah i luv lil ashleigh!
anyway i will put you back to her!

well yeah,,
uhh....
i tried cheese bagel and cinnamon crunch bagel this morning.
which are scrumptious!
but still not quite as good as plain bagel with butter.
(don't believe anyone when they say that cream cheese is better, ok? ;) trust me!)

hmm...

that's all i can think abou t.
oh. and that while we were having all of this fun, Mum and Mrs. Michelle were shopping!
but yeah.

talk to you all soon!

love from us.

we have survived moosageddon!

so, for all of you over in sunny Australia - ha ha ha.... are you missing out or what?
We now know what it feels like to go shopping when the max. temperature was at -9 (not including the wind chill factor). And just a hint for the happy campers...... when it is that cold, don't make snowballs without gloves on!!!

So the trip so far goes like this. We sat in Perth Airport for a while, waiting. (Thanks Josie, Kevin, Michael and Adam for keeping us company.) Then, we sat on an airplane and waited to get to Singapore. At Singapore airport we wandered around for about 1 1/2 hours, waiting for our next plane. Ash got a little excitement. She got to pretend she was Sora in Kingdom Hearts and hang out with Goofy and Donald. Then, onto another plane and waiting until we get to Hong Kong where we ..... waited for another plane.

Luckily though, we had a bit more time. So we changed $40.00 for some lunch. (Unfortunately we slept while we were waiting on the plane and had missed the meals between Perth and now!) After getting to the cafe to eat lunch, we managed to spend 60c more than we had changed. So we had to give one bottle of water back. And then we could eat our lunch. We got to eat it watching Chinese soap operas on the cafe booth t.v. set. We had the best time. The words were in Chinese, the subtitles were in another Chinese (?) and so we made our own words up as we went along. Of course it goes without saying that Ash and I had far more romantic words than Alf did. It was funny to see us being looked at by all the Chinese people, specially since we were the only ones in the airport for a while that didn't look and sound like everyone else. Then after a waiting snooze by Alf and Ash (with Jussie on bag duties) we boarded another plane and waited for another 14 hours to get to Toronto. Until you do it, I don't think you can ever know how BORING sitting still for 14 hours really is. Mind you we all slept alot since there wasn't much else to do.

When we finally got to Toronto we had to ... you guesssed it - WAIT some more. But for a good reason I guess. They had to get the lady behind us off the plane for medical attention so we all had to sit until the medical guys had come in with there special emergency rescue stuff and american sounding voices to take her off very efficiently and all.

and then we were there in all the snow and cold. So our first day was spent buying warmer clothes. By the way Excelsior people, our school jacket is nearly warm enough for -12. It works 'ok' at -8 and hopefully is perfect at 0. No wonder we sometimes got very hot wearing it on duty.

We Got Here!

Hi All
Over 31 hours of travel - 24 of them on planes. We landed about an hour ago. So that we don't succumb to jet lag we will do our best to acclimatise and get into the local time zone by going out to a party now. As you do.
The snow is easily deep enough to bury someone in, but now she feels better so there's not much chance of that happening.
And to those who care "We made it in one piece and will talk to you soon".
To the rest "I'll post the embarrassing photos later".
I wish you could get snow when it wasn't so bloody cold.

Alf and Jus and Ash.