Part I ...The Story.....

Warning....Very long reading post ahead!!!!!!!
Well, we are finally here in Calgary! The past month has been really crazy! We had our house packed on Dec. 17th. Also, on December 17th, was Ben's preschool Christmas program...which if anyone of you read my post in May from his last school program...you know we were a bit nervous. When we got to the auditorium I was approached by another mother asking me if I would be performing that morning..I just laughed and told her I hoped not. Anyway, he did great! We did have to hide from him, but he was successful and we were sooo proud of him! That was a huge accomplishment for him.
We left Louisiana on the 18th of December and drove to my parents in Paducah. On Saturday the 20th we got to go to Nashville to see our friends Robert and Betsy Coggin and their new son, Nik. They had just gotten back to the states after adopting him from Siberia. He was precious and we were so glad to get to see him!
We spent Christmas week at my parents and had my lots of relatives to visit with. It went really well and we had a great time and Christmas with everyone..and yes, I finally got my Christmas shopping done a day or two before!
We left the week after Christmas to start our drive to Calgary. We took our mini-van with an attached 8'5" U-haul trailer and both of our dogs. The first few days were uneventful. The boys were great, but really hyper in the hotel rooms, but the drive was easy. I have never been through Wyoming, S. Dakota, and Montana so it was a new experience. The land up there is totally undeveloped. There are only about half a million people in the entire state of Wyoming. It is all plains and mountains, with hardly any place to stop. One day we drove five hours without having even so much as any fast food place to get the boys lunch! But it was pretty and there was quite a bit of wildlife...
On Friday, we left Great Falls, Montana and we planning to make it to Calgary. It was supposed to be our "short" day of driving. It was snowing, so we checked the road conditions before we left. We started out on I-15 north. We had only gone about 40 miles or so and the snow started getting worse. It was not the actual amount of snow, but the wind was really whipping it...so our visibility got quickly worse. We kept slowing down until we could not even see the road or anything in front of our car. We were in a White Out. We saw that a Semi had pulled over, and Earle decided that if the Semi pulled over, then maybe we should too. Quickly, cars started piling in all around us and stopping in the middle of the interstate. Earle got out to talk to the guy in the Semi, and came back with a sheet of ice frozen over his entire face. It was 8 below with probably a wind chill of 25 or 30 below. Luckily we had a full tank of gas and heat! After being there about 30 min. Earle looked up a Comfort Inn in the next big town and called them to make a reservation! It was a really good thing he did that! We were stranded there for about 3 and a half hours. After about 3 hours, we realized that we were stuck in the snow drifts that had quickly piled around our car. We did not have a shovel, so Earle used a drawer from under my seat in our mini-van and shovel the snow from around the tires...quite a few attempts. Bless his heart, he had to wrap one of Ben's sweatshirts around his face to be able to stand out there long enough to do this. We had called 911 and they told us that we were in a group of 30 cars stranded and that they were sending emergency vehicles to help us, but it would be a while. Some how, we were able to inch our way out of being stuck and slowly start driving. By now the roads were visible to some extent...but they were completely unploughed...and we do not have 4 wheel drive and did not have chains on our mini-van...so it was a nerve wracking hour and half down the slippery snow packed mountain hills to our exit. We were so excited to see our exit, we pulled off and started to turn into the street where the Comfort Inn was and we got stuck!! Luckily a nice man and his wife were driving by and saw us stuck and the wife told her husband that it looked like we had children in the vehicle and that they should stop and help us. He had a tow chain and pulled us out twice before we could get into our hotel! Wow, that was such a gift from God! When we got to the Comfort Inn, we were lucky because of all of the people stranded, they had no rooms left, in the whole town! So anyway, we stayed the night there and left the next morning and arrived in Calgary late Saturday afternoon.
We went to church on Sunday morning and really enjoyed it! The people were so friendly to us! We were dead tired though! We even made it though Monday. Ben had his first day at school and loved it. Also, some new friends, the Lonard's had us over for dinner last night, they are X-pat too, so it was great to talk to some people that have been through this.
At the moment, we are in our little temporary apt. I think I speak for Earle and I both, we are feeling more than a little overwhelmed. We are still really tired from the past few weeks. Canada is different than the U.S.A. Not only do I have a new city to get to know, and I have to learn to drive in snow all of the time, but lots of things are different. There gas is in liters instead of gallons, they have a different currency than we do so I have to think about the exchange rate constantly, speed limits are in kilometers and not MPH, measurements are metric, temperature is in Celsius, not Fahrenheit, and the grocery store is different, the food is called different things and it is way more expensive. We went to the store on Sunday evening, we got about 5 small bags of groceries...it was $180.00!!! Earle just about had a heart attack right there! All in all though, I do think we are going to like it here. It is just going to take a little time to get accustomed to all of the little differences. It is a beautiful town and the people are friendly. We are excited about our church. We will keep you posted..and I plan to post Part II...the pictures today or tomorrow!! Have a good one!
CB