God Save The King

In the movie "Field of Dreams" there is a scene where a baseball player calls out to Kevin Costner's character, asking, "Is this heaven?"  

Kevin replies, "It's Iowa."  

Well, Edmonton, Alberta looks a lot like Madison County, Iowa. And parts of Tennessee.  But without their humidity and oppressive summer temperatures.  Edmonton stays around 68 degrees.  Ok, they do temps here in metric, so it would be 20 degrees. Sure does seem like 68F.

We got here at the end of the week after braving strong winds, rain and traffic all the way up from the border. Edmonton is about 400 miles north of the U.S. border, but the speed limit is 110 Kph (that's in kilometers) so you get here a lot faster.   No, that doesn't make any sense. I get that.  But it just seems faster in kilometers.

We are visiting our winter neighbours, Rick and Geri Beaumont (left).  During the winter they live across the street from us in Green Valley, but return to their native Edmonton for the cool summers.  Most of their neighbors here are retired also, and many of them winter in one part of Arizona or another. They all live on the north side of the city, in a rapidly growing residential area.

On Friday Rick and Geri took us on a tour of this amazing capital city of over a million residents.  It has rolling hills, a river and championship traffic.  And an interesting downtown area. The Art Gallery of Alberta is shown at right. 













The North Saskatchewan River runs through it.

Ukraine West

In the early part of the 20th century, immigrants arrived here from the Ukraine to take advantage of the free land available in Canada.  Rick and Geri took us out to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village just outside Edmonton.  It is something like our Williamsburg in Virginia, where you get to experience what it was like to live in colonial times.  The time period here is later, of course.  Europeans and others continued to arrive here long after the  government lands were gone in the U.S.  At the village we found Ukrainian homes and businesses staffed by the descendants of the hardy immigrants from a hundred years ago.

The staff members stay character, dealing with visitors as if we had just parachuted into Ukrainian Canada in the early 20th Century. It was really fun.

We visited the train station and grain storage elevator.  And got put in jail by the constable and his wife. The jail was in her front parlor.

The immigrants were not ready for the cold winters they found here. While they were building their permanent homes they survived living in structures of poles covered by layers of sod and reeds.  

This nice lady (left) didn't speak much English, but let us know that she was taking care of the sod home and garden of the Burdei family.  Mrs. Burdei, it seemed, was working in the fields somewhere else and her husband had gone off to work in a coal mine. She had no TV, microwave or dishwasher.  Life must have been tough. 

I noticed the garden beside the house had sprouted, and asked Rick if the sprouts were onions.  "Grain," he said.  "You can't make bread with onions."  No, I said, but you can make good Chili...

The highlight for us was our visit to the village schoolhouse. The young teacher was a tough taskmaster. He checked our hands and fingernails for cleanliness before starting our lessons.  Then he had us get our slates out and write down the plural form of tough words like "goose." And graded our penmanship.

Then it got really tough.  In our history lesson he demanded that we write down the names of the original four Canadian provinces.  I was told my effort was lacking.  Apparently, Ottawa is a city not a province, and the Hudson Bay Company was never a government entity.  But I got praised for being able to correctly identify wall portraits of the British King George and Queen Mary. "The last group could only come up with "King" or "George," but never did put it all together," he told us in his heavy Ukranian accent.  I beamed.

On the other hand, I was not able to come up with the dates when the first three major railroads were completed in Canada.  I am apparently going to be held back a grade.  Thank goodness we were supposed to be there in 1927, so I didn't have to name the current prime minister. Or any more provinces.

The best news was that we were able to stand and loudly sing "God Save the King," (left) which sounded a lot like "My Country Tis of Thee." 

The German family seemed puzzled.  They got up and left. They were being held back a grade also.

This is a very complete community of businesses and farms.  They even have several Ukrainian Greek Orthodox churches.  In all, there are 60 different buildings in this village, with a dozen more under construction.

Afterwards, we went outside to the food service area and enjoyed Kubasa sausage and Perogies, which are potato dumplings stuffed with onion and topped with sour cream and mosquitoes.




Please note that we are planning to depart here on Tuesday morning and travel northwest toward the start of the Alaskan Highway. We won't have wifi services too often along this road, so this blog may get even more irregular.  While we move through British Columbia and Yukon Territory during the next two or three weeks, our cell phones won't work, and we will only get emails when we happen upon some kind of wifi.  So for the immediate future, please don't send us everything you email out.  We will let you know when we get to Alaska and get back online.  

Onward and Upward!

John and Marsha