Dragon

Must tell you about our camping trip. This is very late in the season to go camping up here. In fact the Labour day long weekend (which was 2 weeks ago here in Canada for those of you who don't celebrate it in your countries) is usually considered the last big weekend for camping and the campgrounds get much quieter after that. That's not to say no one goes after labour day and actually when the weather stays nice you can get several good trips in after. In central Alberta we've had an absolutely miserable summer this year though, we have not had more than about 6 days this year that I would call summery, otherwise it's just been rain and cloud and cold. We were not daunted though, we bought a holiday trailer last month and we were determined to get at least one weekend in this year before the snow flies (which could be any day now). We went to a Provincial campground about an hour away from home and we just about had the whole place to ourselves. It was indeed very cold in the mornings and there was frost on the spiderwebs on Friday and Saturday morning, but as soon as the sun came out it was quite nice. By quite nice I mean we could strip down to only 3 layers instead of 4 but that just meant we could build the fire up and have an excuse to cook over it and stay nice and warm. We're looking forward to next summer when we can have some really good weather for it and can get some more use out of the trailer.

Baldur

Dragon,
Baldur would definitely enjoy cool weather camping to sweltering in the Summer heat that we had here all Summer.
Do you have any special camping foods that you look forward too when roughing it?

When Baldur was young my family would go to a local beach that was a large pond set in a pine forest. It did not attract the crowds that the ocean beaches did so it was better for a pleasant quiet type day trip.
Our family would pack up the car obscenely early in the morning and get there long before anyone else. The sun was just barely up in the sky and it was always still cold and damp,
They had outdoor stone fireplaces there where you could build a fire and cook your meals, though it required that one lugged a heavy bag of charcoal all the way from the car. The woods were kept very groomed by the park rangers and other than the occasional small sticks or twigs there was never any firewood sitting around waiting to be used.
My sisters and I would be sent off to gather as much of these scarce little pieces of wood as possible. No doubt this was done in an effort to keep us out of the way while my father got the fire started but we would eventually make our way back with an armload of sap-sticky, spider covered kindling.

We would also haul a huge cast iron skillet with us on these trips to the pond.
My father would get the fire going and my mother would cook a pound of bacon in the skillet. Then she would remove the bacon and fry eggs in the bacon grease. It is nearly impossible to control the amount of heat in a charcoal and sticky twig fire so the frying eggs would sputter, sending bits of boiling bacon grease into the air.
The eggs would end up sizzling brown and tough around the edges but the yolks were still runny.
We would also have crusty hard rolls from the bakery that we warmed on skewers held over the fire.
Those were the best breakfasts ever.

Baldur

Happy Birthday to Princess Jenna bint Al Ghazi, Dante Hall, Arn Anderson, Sophia Loren, Gogi Grant, Fernando Rey, Red Auerbach, Jelly Roll Morton, Upton Sinclair and James Dewar.

Dragon

Dragon loves many of the camping foods but I think my favorite is tin foil dinners. These consist of cubed or sliced potatoes, onions, carrots and ground beef if you're so inclined. You portion these out into little tinfoil wrapped packages with butter and spices as desired (I'm particularly fond of pepper and an herb seasoning mix not unlike Mrs.Dash). You can cook these on the barbeque but for the real camping experience you'll want to throw them into the coals of the fire to cook. Doing it this way means you have very little control over the heat they get and you often end up with parts of the meal getting a little blackened but I actually really like it when the potatoes or onions get just slightly blackened and stick to the foil a little, yum! Sadly, we didn't get to do these on this trip but I know I'll get my chance. One of my very fondest memories of camping with the family is food related, we always took those little individual sized boxes of cereal to have for breakfast. You could be boring and open the top to pour the contents into a bowl but the boxes themselves were scored so you could lay them flat and cut open the front then pour the milk right in and eat it from the box that way. This amused us to no end, though I suspect my parents motives were more along the lines of creating fewer dishes to be washed. These packs always came with a variety of cereals which always contained Frosted Flakes and Fruit Loops amon the other more healthy Bran Flakes and whatnot. Being that we never got sugary cereals at home there was always a great deal of jockeying to get those ones. I seem to remember my mom would always buy enough so that each of us would get one of each. This means she and dad were stuck with a lot of Bran Flakes and Corn Flakes but it did promote peace for a while.

We did try out a 'camp cooker' for the first time (first time for me anyway). This device is like a small version of one of those hot sandwich makers only it's attached to long handles so you use the fire to heat it up. We made grilled cheese sandwiches with onions and ham with this and they turned out really good. We also did the obligatory roasted marshmallows and smore's to very good result too. My sweetie's dad and step mom came out and we made smore's for them, I was very surprised when his step mom told me that not only had she never had them she didn't even know how to make them. I thought that was one of those things that everyone just sort of knew even if they didn't do it themselves.

Baldur would probably have very much enjoyed the weather we got, and truth be told, despite the fact that I am very much a lover of heat, when I think back to the childhood camping trips we always brought lots of sweaters and warm clothes to wear because it was always at least a little chilly. It just wouldn't seem like real camping if you didn't have to wear a few layers.

I do remember that our trips always started extremly early in the mornig with our dad chivying us into the car to get on the road at first light. Everything was always packed the night before and as much as possible was already in the station wagon so as not to lose any time but, of course, getting 3 children up and ready at ungodly hours is always a chore and I suspect he often told us we had to be on the road by 6:00 sharp so that we could actually be going by sometime before 7:30.

Baldur

Happy Birthday to Jason Derulo, Ricki Lake, Faith Hill, Bill Murray, Stephen King, Jerry Bruckheimer, Fanny Flagg, Henry Gibson, Larry Hagman, Chuck Jones, Gustav Holst and HG Wells.

Baldur

Happy Birthday to Scott Baio, Tai Babilonia, Joan Jett, Andrea Bocelli, Nick Cave, Debby Boone, Shari Belafonte, King Sunny Ade, Toni Basil, Tommy Lasorda, Rosamunde Pilcher, Michael Faraday and Anne of Cleves.

Dragon

Last night I was watching a show in which one of the characters had to spend some time working in Canada with the RCMP. I feel I must correct some of the misconceptions American TV has foisted onto the American public. Despite the fact that they are The Royal Canadian Mounted Police the vast majority of RCMP members do not ride horses. They don't ride them to work, they don't ride them at work, I'm pretty sure there's a great many of them who have never ridden a horse in their life. They use police cruisers just like any other police force. The second thing that American TV (and yes, sometimes Canadian TV too) gets wrong pretty much every single time is the uniform. The traditional red coat (known as Serge) and tan hat are the dress uniform. This is usually worn only for very special occasions such as visits from royalty or important funerals. I see RCMP members on a regular basis and I have never seen one wearing Serge.
Hope that doesn't come across as a rant but I just always cringe when I see that.

Also Canadians don't drink beer at breakfast, well, no more of us do than Americans anyway. We do take our beer seriously but we're not that bad.

Login

Thanks for enlightening us, Dragon. It sparked an amusing thought ... I imagined the Queens guardsmen turning up for duty in battle zones, wearing their busbys, stiff necked uniforms and swords! Not really a funny situation but it was a comparison in my minds eye.

Baldur

Happy Birthday to Ani DiFranco, Jason Alexander, Bruce Springsteen, Julio Iglesias, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Mickey Rooney, Louise Nevelson, Kublai Khan, Augustus Caesar and Euripides.

polenta

Yes, Dragon given the name of Mounted Police we could think they ride horses. I also remember having seen them in comics and they were like that and with the serge you mention. Therefore, thank you for teaching us all that.

Dragon

They did actually used to be mounted way back when. They originally started as the North West Mounted Police before Canada was even officially a country. Then they became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Of course they had a lot of ground to cover and they did ride and I believe back then they did wear red coats and wide brimmed, tan hats but they've become completely modern now. They are basically our federal police force and fill the same role in Canada as the FBI does in the US. There is still the RCMP Musical Ride as well. These are a highly trained group of Mountie horsemen who go around the country doing performances of fancy riding. They do indeed wear the traditional serge and it's quite a treat to get to see them perform.

Oh and what a day for birthdays today! I've heard of almost all of them. Happy b-day to the Boss!

Baldur

And a very special Happy Birthday to Eric Bogle. I'd not heard of him before today.

polenta

Baldur and listeners,
Here you can see the playback of a beautiful landscape drawing. You should press where it says VER DIBUJO( see pic) or VER DIBUJO Y UTENSILIOS (see pic and pencil).
Let me know if it taught you something or you liked it. I think this drawing website is also in English by pressing some button.

http://www.dibujosparapintar.com/cuaderno_de_dibujo-dibujo.php?id=6163&v=33

polenta

I think I've found the English version

http://www.dibujosparapintar.com/english_activities/drawing_online.html

Baldur

Happy Birthday to 'Mean' Joe Greene, Linda McCartney, Jim Henson, Anthony Newley, Sheila MacRae, Fats Navarro, Jim McKay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Marshall, Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin, Sir Arthur Guinness, and Horace Walpole.

Baldur

Happy Birthday to Catherine Zeta-Jones, Will Smith, Heather Locklear, Zucchero, Anson Williams, Christopher Reeve, Mark Hamill, Cheryl Tiegs, Michael Douglas, Juliet Prowse, Shel Silverstein, Barbara Walters, Sir Colin Davis, Aldo Ray, Dmitri Shostakovich, William Faulkner, Fletcher Christian and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Normal

Enjoyed your very mild rant, Dragon! A beloved Montreal friend, an Irish import, widow and fellow dog-owner, really got up on her high horse when any suggestion was made that Canadians were "just like" Americans.

Having been there in late 70s at the height of the cultural wars, I was recently thinking about the bilingualism. Do I recall correctly that Canadian kids learn the "other" language (be it French or English) at a very early age? It was interesting that the Montreal French got so huffy, while the Quebec City French (more secure in their Francophone situation) were always extremely polite and accommodating about speaking English with the hapless Anglophone tourists.

Hazer

Normal, I like Dragon, grew up in the Western Canada, far removed from Quebec and blissfully unaware of any language debates going on in the east. That is until I entered grade 9 to find that I was now required to learn to speak and read French. None of us in my school, including our teachers, were personally acquainted with anyone French, least of all the principal of the school who's task it was to make us bilingual by the end of the year.
So without the benefit of any recorded teaching tools, we bumbled along, with our very English frame of reference preventing us from getting our tongues around the pronunciation of all but the most common words.
I'm sure if anyone French had been eavesdropping on our class they would have found it quite amusing. . . a sort of comedy of errors.
On the one occasion I have had since then to test out my language skills when visiting Quebec, I discovered that the French I was taught may be spoken somewhere in France, but in Canada the language has taken on its own form with various dialects being spoken in different regions.
A total waste of tax payers money if you ask me. . . but then no one did, so I'll go back to my Saturday chores.

Dragon

Interesting that you didn't get any french until grade 9 Hazer. In Calgary we started taking french in grade 3 and went until grade 6. Like you we took Parisian french and I often wondered if it wouldn't have made more sense to learn Quebecois french. I recall going on a day long field trip to Heritage Park (which is a historic village in Calgary) where we spent the whole day at an old one room school house. This was a field trip for french class and I think the teachers thought we were a French Immersion class because they refused to speak a single word of english at all the whole day. Needless to say, a bunch of Grade 5 kids who could barely figure out comment ce va (I'm not even sure I spelled that right!) did not have a very good time and I don't suppose we really learned anything that day. I'm sure if we were immersed in it on a daily basis we would all have caught on fairly quickly but I hardly see the point when it was just for one day.

My best friend and all her siblings did go to french immersion school from kindergarten right through junior high. Her parents are quite politically minded and I think they wanted their kids to have every option to be in politics in their adulthood. (In Canada if you want to be Prime Minister you're going to have to speak French fairly regularly.) All it did for my best friend, though, was to make her hate the language with a serious passion and her brother was doing so poorly with it they ended up putting him back in an English speaking school much earlier, he did very well after that so they could be pretty sure it was the language issue that was holding him back.

polenta

I'm learning so much about Canada... and I like this!
Lesson 1: you must know French to be a politician in Canada (interesting)
Lesson 2: you never have to force children to learn what they don't want
to.
Lesson 3; Still to be answered. Should they teach Canadian or Parisian
French in Canada? (here we were taught the latter of course)