Day # 3

Just wanted to drop a quick line and say that "We're here!"

Traveling to Canada was pretty uneventful, thankfully...until we landed. Our plane arrived in Edmonton after a connection in Minneapolis/St. Paul. As Matt and I stood in customs/immigration line we were overhead paged to the baggage claim desk. After our passports were stamped we learned from the baggage claim folks that two bags did not make it. One was Matt's (whatev), but most importantly the other was mine. Out of all my times traveling both domestically and abroad I have never had this happen. It's no fun. But the Canadain folks were great to call twice daily to let me know that they still had no idea where my bag was and for some reason couldn't tell me if it even made it Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. Lovely. To make a long story short it finally arrived yesterday; only two days after me. It was like Christmas!

So, here we are adjusted to the time change (only 2 hours so no biggie) and to the amount of daylight Edmonton receives. The sun's up at 4:30 AM and doesn't set until around 11 PM. It's weird. It's taken us a while to be able to sleep until even 7 AM. I catch myself thinking, "Why am I so tired when it looks like 3:30 outside?" Then I look at a clock and see that it 10 PM!

Yesterday was Sunday, so church. Matt preached his first of 5 sermons yesterday and did a fine job if I say so myself. The members of Crestwood Presbyterian are very friendly and we had a wonderful time meeting with them between church and Sunday school in the fellowship hall. Sunday school (it's called something else I cannot remember) happens after the church service at Crestwood, but I can't comment on how it was seeing as I missed it. Instead I ended up talking 50 minutes straight with one of the women of the church. Our husbands found us in the same spot they left us still talking after Sunday school let out. I was shocked we didn't notice everyone leave the fellowship hall. Matt didn't seemed surprised.

Our schedule has started to really fill up with visits and dinner with different church members. And (to our great joy) we have a car while we are here! We are hoping this car takes us out toward Jasper National Park at some point within the next two weeks.

Today we are visiting "the mall." Of course we have mixed feelings about visiting a mall when we are so close to places like Banff and Jasper, but we have been told we should at least see "the largest mall in North America" while we are here.