An extended weekend in Alberta

Last week I was in the lovely city of Calgary for work meetings, this was the view from my hotel room:

Pretty isn't it? 

Then when the meetings were over I hopped on a little 14 seater Beech 1900 D . A snow storm was happening in Edmonton and had caused multiple smaller flights out of Calgary to be cancelled. As I waited for my 2pm flight there were many people told that they would not be flying that day. Some very sad families that's for sure. Then when it was finally time for us to board, all 6 of us got on the plane and then waited for the left prop to start spinning. It didn't. I watched the ground crew literally scratch their heads and look at it, finally it started (no help from the ground crew). Then we had to wait for the plane to warm up. Then we moved 5 feet and stopped. We did that about 18 times. Finally it was time to get de-iced and then we crept along the runway waiting for our turn to take off. I was thinking we'd have to be de-iced again, but we made it out without problems. The cloud cover was so thick that our whole flight ended up being in the clouds (the co-pilot had told us that he hoped we'd be able to fly above the clouds). When the plane is this little you can see all the flight controls and look out the front window -which may not be such a good thing. As we approached the runway to land we were zig-zagging left and right and I thought we were going to hit hard - but we had a very beautiful text book landing. Yay, thank you female pilot!

When I arrived, it was snowing, and this is what I woke up to the next morning:

 A view of my mom's backyard, from inside the house.

Brr, I wasn't ready to get outside yet. 

It was  -19 degree celsius (that's -2.2 F) and about 1' of snow had fallen. But I must admit that I didn't feel cold, it was actually quite pleasant. And I also thank my family for lending me hats, coats, boots and gloves when needed.

And later that day I had gone out with my SIL and then made the mistake of stepping outside to see where my brother was - next thing I knew I had a snow blower in my hand and I had cleared 3 driveways and the sidewalk! LOL-JK!

It was just a quickie little visit but it was a nice. My mom and brother live a couple of houses away from each other and it's nice to be able to just run back and forth as needed. On the morning before I left my brother made up yummy  waffle batter and then brought everything over to my mom's house for our brunch.

Here's my cookie monster waffle: 

So I got lots of dog walking done, ate lots of yummy meals and enjoyed myself. Hopefully my family enjoyed my visit too.