The Christmas Train

This week has been very festive, we have been out to a couple of Christmas parties. The first was at Shaun's work on friday afternoon in to the evening, the office closed at 3pm and partners and families were invited. The boss arranged outside caterers and the best thing was we only had to wander up the hill to get home.

Our second party was at our neighbours who hosted a Christmas 'drinks' do where we managed to catch up with our neighbours. Everyone seems to be hiberating now it's winter - the only time we get to see folks is when we are all out shovelling the snow from our driveways!

Thursday evening was fun when we went to the Lakeside park to see the Christmas train. The Christmas train has been running for the last nine years to raise food donations and money for local food banks. This year the train started off in Montreal on the 1st December and travels across Canada ending up in Vancouver in the 18th December.

The train stopped in Nelson on Thursday evening, so we took along our bag of tinned and dried foodstuffs for the food bank donation and we were treated to the Canadian Pacific train fully decorated in christmas lights and playing carols arriving at the park. Both sides of one of the carriages opened up and we enjoyed an hour-long show including carols, a Canadian rock-blues band called Wide Mouth Mason and Father Christmas.

As usual it seemed like the whole town turned out even though it was about -10 degrees and snowing! Here is another pictures of the train taken from BOB - the Big Orange Bridge.

We have spent most of the weekend at the ski hill enjoying our season passes. Shaun has been testing different skis as one of our local outdoor stores called R.O.A.M. has been at the hill offering demo skis to try out. The current favourites are the Reverend by G3 or Gotama from Volkl. The ski hill seemed pretty busy today as the parking lot was full even when we arrived there at 9.30am. We assumed that there were a lot of people heading off into the back country as the queues for the lifts were only about half a dozen folks. There was one funny thing that happened today at the hill - the water supply failed. We assumed that the pump to the well or creek had failed or frozen. Anyway the washrooms were out of order, however they posted a member of staff outside the washrooms to say that you were allowed to use the facilities "but you can't flush and you can only do number ones". Only in Nelson! Still it was better than making yellow snow! Here is a picture we took last week in the sunshine from the Silver King ski lift going up to the top of the piste.

Harley and Phantom are enjoying the snow and we are getting used to having to shovel the snow from the drive soon after it snows. We made a dreadfull mistake of leaving a huge build-up of snow one Monday morning, only to find it rained a little during the day and all the soft, light, dry, powder had turned into a very heavy white slab making the job of clearing it a real headache. So like the neighbours, we try to keep on top of it, besides it makes for a good workout and a trip to the gym.

Well that's all for this week, bye for now and we look forward to hearing all your plans for the Christmas period. Rachael, Shaun, Harley & Phantom.