Victoria So Far...

 Victoria, BC

Marker Zero Dude!

Today we walked about 1.7 miles (yes Canada uses miles, sometimes, see here for my rant on how inconsistent Canada is with measurements) to The Trans-Canada Highway Mile Marker Zero.  The Trans-Canada Highway aka T-Can or TCH starts in Victoria and goes across Canada through 9 of the 10 provinces and ends in St. John in Newfoundland and Retriever on the island of Newfoundland.  We will be driving a bit of this highway on our way to Calgary next month and we already drove it a bit in Manitoba during our Winnipeg stay.  

Our walk took us through Beacon Hill park.  Traveling with the seasons lets us see the "Cherry Blossom" (I'm not sure if these are Cherry Blossoms but they are pink and bloomy) blooms longer and in more places.

The Mile Marker 0 sign is there on the tip of the park with no crosswalk access.  Typical!

Where The T-Can and BC 17 meet.

What Else Have We Been Up To?

So things here are a bit less frenetic than Las Vegas and Portland and when I say a bit less I mean a lot less.  We are taking our time with seeing things in the area so we don't run out of things to do right away.  We do have our van so we can explore more of the island when we run out, so there is that.

Day 1

On the first day we took Francis for a walk in the area and took some photos.  This is The Centennial Fountain.

Francis is getting used to the Metric smells.

Skateboarding is recognized as a mode of transportation here.

Donna and I split a doughnut at Frickin' Good Donuts.

We visited our first new brewery of the trip.

It's about a 3 minute walk to this place.  While we were there a gal gave us a flyer for a Bao popup happening about an hour later.

They have 1 pinball machine so I played.

We took Francis home and returned for the Bao popup to support the locals with our tourist dollars.

The Bao were delicious.

Day 2

On day 2 we rode the bus out to Oak Harbor.  We did this on our last trip here and enjoyed it.  We revisited The Penny Farthing and had a beer and a lunch snack.  It was as good as we remembered.  After our snack we walked to Deadbeetz Burgers to play some pinball but it was closed on Mondays so we will return another day.

The Penny Farthing is just a normal British style pub but we like it because we have been there before.

This morning we were able to open up our new "Coffee Cream".  It's creamier than our half and half back in the states.  

Creamy 18% M.F.!

This is all I can think of when I see 18% M.F.

Oh and another fun fact, this is our 2nd Airbnb where we can see a draw bridge from our place.  Today The Johnson St. Bridge raised and we got to see it.  We could also see The Broadway Bridge from our Portland Airbnb and saw it raise a few times.

That's it for today.  If you missed, Portland -> Victoria BC, check it out.

Settled in Albuquerque

 Albuquerque, NM

*not a selfie

Eating Local

Today we finished getting settled, did some more grocery shopping, and got take out for dinner. 

We started out waking up from a great sleep.  It is so quiet in the neighborhood we are staying and the temperature is perfect for sleeping.  It's going to be a relaxing month I think.

We finished getting organized and unpacked and there is plenty of space for our stuff which is great.  Later in the afternoon we went grocery shopping at El Super again.  Donna picked a few recipes off newmexico.org's recipe list.

We needed New Mexico Red Chilis for a dish and these looked close to the Google search.  Later I found the real chilis and put these back.  The downside is we had to buy about 5x the amount we needed.  I guess we have a month to use them all.

November 1st is Dia De Los Muertos and we are going to get one of these to celebrate.  Eat local!

We also bought 5 for $4 pastries for "lunch" when we got back.  They were great.

When we got home we quickly realized that nothing we were making was going to be done in time for dinner.  We (I say we but Donna ended up doing most of the work) had to make broth and green sauce which took a few hours.  We decided to get take out for dinner tonight.  I drove across town to get great Mexican food at El Paisa Taqueria.  It is a cash only place and the food is very cheap.

There was a nice man selling things in the eating area of the restaurant

So I bought fresh chicharrons.  

The rest of the evening was cooking, eating great Mexican food, and watching PBS.  So far we are having a very relaxing stay which is needed because Denver was GO GO GO.

The end result of our all day cooking is a double recipe of green chili sauce for 2 recipes we have planned.

The blue counties are all of the new counties for this trip.  We hope to grab a few more surrounding counties before we leave and we will get 2 more on the way out in November.

Our New Mexico Highway Map is getting some miles too.  We are up to 443 miles in NM now.

That's it for today.  If you missed There's A New Mexico, check it out.  Homer Simpson was right, there is a new Mexico.

The Corn and Apple Festival

 Morden, MB

Free Corn in Morden!

This morning Donna and I did the 1.5 hour drive to Morden, MB.  Morden is about 20 minutes from the US border just above a city in North Dakota that you have never heard of.  The festival was in Downtown Morden so the streets were closed and we got to see all of the shops.  Donna learned of this festival by reading the local newspaper and the article wasn't about festivals, it was about Morden trying to because an urbanist walkable place.  

Morden has the tree lined streets going on so that's a good start.

Or festival visit started off with the the craziest petting zoo you ever did see.

It's like they got all of the animals in the area and chose the ones that had the smallest chance of biting children or each other and put them in a giant pen full of screaming running kids.

Li'l Sebastian!

We learned a lot about this tortoise from its child handler.  We learned that the pyramids on the back of the shell wear down in the wild due to sand storms.

Once we found the main drag of the festival we had to get our bearings.  

FREE CORN AND APPLE JUICE!  That is what we are here for.

We drove 1.5 hours for a free $0.25 CDN ear of corn.  We walked up to the free corn area but we were an hour early so we had to wait.

We walked through the craft area.  /start sarcasm I am sure these are licensed /end sarcasm.

We wondered if these colorful gals were Mennonites.  Usually you don't see that much party on the lower half when the upper half is so conservative.

We found BeaverTails in Canada!  We have only ever seen them in the Canada Pavilion at EPCOT.

The free corn was a bit crazy at opening

 so we thought we would kill some more time at a brewery

I got a very nice IPA

We ordered cheese fries and they arrived I felt it was a very small serving of fries with cheese but it turned out to be a reasonable serving of cheese cut in the shape of fries and fried.  They were delicious.

We both liked the Marathon Pizza sign.

We visited the Quality Canadian Milk stand.

We received tiny milkshakes for free!

The corn was cooked with a 1916 case steam engine courtesy of the Pembina Threshermen's Museum

The Steam Engine

The machine in back is actually shucking the corn and dumping it out into buckets waiting to be boiled.

They boiled the corn in batches for 8 minutes and then moved to those crates to serve to us.

When the 8 minute boil was done they passed out the corn and then the process started over again so the line moved in groups.

They claim this is the freshest corn you can get.  It was picked this morning and then they say they flash freeze it until it is ready to be shucked.  We couldn't actually confirm it was frozen going into the shucking machine.

But we could confirm that the corn was delicious!  A little oil and salt made it even more delicious.

We left with 3 ciders

And honey as well as chokecherry jam.

We added some more miles to our Manitoba Highways.  We are up to 240 miles now.

We also ticked off a few more County Equivalents in Manitoba.

That was it for today.  If you missed Farmers Market and Thrifting, you can find it via the link.