european adventure

goodbye calgary

a few of my favorite things...

recent acquisition

©2009 Karen Klassen

my last weekend in Calgary

We've spent most of our weekends up to this point, and any other free time, just trying to get stuff done before our big move. Since this was our last weekend in Calgary, we decided to take some time off from our 'to do' lists and just have some fun. It ended up being one of the best weekends ever.

• my best friend was in town visiting and I hadn't seen her in over a year
• I drank some pints on a patio
• attended the Calgary Stampede for the second time in 11 years (I'm usually not a fan)
• went out for breakfast; ate yummy dutch pancakes
• window shopped with girlfriends
• sat in a park downtown and chatted
• went to a BBQ at the home of some good friends
• played board games and drank lemonade
• walked around in the sun holding hands with Dario
• attended an all ages musical show - my husband performed

tips for passport photos, travel insurance, thank you gifts...

Some things I discovered while planing our trip:

• If you need passport or visa photos, the best price I found was at AMA (CAA). Plus, if you have a membership your photos are free.

• Travel Cuts had the best price for travel insurance by far - their best coverage was still close to half the price of any other quote I got. Plus, they offer budget plans with less coverage depending on what you want and can afford.

• We wanted to bring something 'Canadian' with us to Europe to give as a thank you gift to people we stay with. Because we're only going with backpacks, space is at a premium so it had be something very small. We ended up getting a bunch of Canadian flag pins from our local member of parliament office - they're free for people who live in the constituency.

the ball is rolling...

After a stressful and busy couple of weeks of packing and selling our stuff, we moved out of our house on Sunday. Big thank you to my family and Dario's friend, Colin, who helped us move. My parents drove for 10 hours to come pick up the stuff we're storing and bring it back to their place in Saskatchewan. The new owners took possession of our house and moved in yesterday. Even though it's what we want and we know we're going on to more exciting things, we were sad to leave our home. I had lived there for 6 years, Dario for 3. We had fixed it up quite a bit and we loved it.

Now that that part is over, I feel like I actually have time to relax now. Maybe even do some drawing.

We're down to our last 2 weeks in Calgary.

portrait

©2009 Jacqueline Hudon-Verrelli

some sketches from a project I'm working on...

©2009 Jacqueline Hudon-Verrelli


©2009 Jacqueline Hudon-Verrelli


©2009 Jacqueline Hudon-Verrelli

european adventure - update

I got this lovely, colorful photo of the Old Town in Edinburgh from Wikipedia

We finally chose a city in the U.K. in which we will begin our European adventure. The winner was Edinburgh, Scotland. After doing a bunch of research we felt that it would be a good place to start. Although not a cheep city to live in, it is more affordable than London, which is where we were initially going to start. What really sold us though was how beautiful it is. When I dreamed about living in a European city, it looked like Edinburgh.

Our house sold last week and we have to be out by the end of June so we've been working like mad to get packed and tie up all our loose ends. It's very exciting. We're down to our last 5 weeks :)