Canada

Well there is certainly more to come re the cricket reports. Worms, Manhattans pictures of Burt Reynolds, you name it. But, that will have to wait until this evening. First is the announcement that, rather than construct a site called
www.timinlethbridge.blogspot.com

I have opted to add on the Canada travels to this account. Here is something I prepared at the airport hotel:

Before leaving Heathrow I bought some ‘noise cancelling earphones’, which somehow bend the laws of physics to their every whim. There is also some room for battery insertion, presumeably if I want to cancel more noise than I need and actually effect an X-men type silence over my fellow travellers. Unfortunately I had traded in the last of my pounds and was unable to play the role of Silencio.

I had the privilege of sitting near a female Sherlock Holmes of a flight attendant on the trip over. She would roam around, not unlike Clive Lloyd in the covers, and with narrow, Clint Eastwood-esque eyes, ask “Any rubbish?” I replied that I had none to which her eyes narrowed even further. Looking to my right she asked “Is that not rubbish?” Touche salesman. The blokes at immigration stapled in an A4 sheet into my passport. Now my passport wallet is as thick as a bankers (do we still hate bankers? What’s the story with that?) and may well be the cause of a mugging in Downtown Lethbridge. I hear that Canada is without the crime-centric AK Cities of this world, but forewarned is forearmed, literally.



Knackered, I nabbed my luggage and walked down to my hotel. Eleven dollars for internet in the room cannot compete with zero dollars down in the lobby: my flat cap and 7-euro jacket must have bought me some street-cred with the porters as they extended the ‘5 minute usage’ up to the full half hour. I thought it might be pushing the Commonwealth relations a little too far if I actually wrote and compiled this entry while there – indeed the searches for pictures of Micheal Keaton (see below) might have aroused suspicions. I caught up on Netherlands vs Slovakia on the TV before heading down for dinner. The menu was star studded with beef: apparently more than half of the beef consumed in Canada is supplied by Alberta. Bang. There were tenderloins, striploins (which sounds surely too raunchy for inclusion in a family restaurant), and plenty of other cuts getting around. I thought that I would save my first steak experience for a time when I was actually awake: I opted for the nachos, under the ‘lite bites’ menu. It was anything but the former. If I had pulled a Michael Keaton


I might have got through three-quarters of it. As it was I ordered a ‘glass’ of beer – I don’t think pints have made there way here, least not in the airport. I let the inhouse pool go through to the keeper, while also getting the Blues leave out on the in-room movies. For some reason I thought that watching Anthony Hopkins in the succinctly titled film “The Wolfman” would be a good way to pass a transatlantic flight. Error. Time to wait at the coffee shop to be whisked away to Lethbridge. Classic times. More soon.