A nice Indian festival to celebrate Ganesha falls on a working day.. a Monday!
Between jugging a car that has to be serviced and work and doing a pooja, Ganesha, the lord of removing obstacles, removed them all one after another.
San made limited edition (read limited quantity) of Kozhukkattai samples and vadai and they were (it is already in the past tense) amazing.
Usually I send selfies to my mom after any Indian festival. This time, posting it in the blog.. because as you can all tell, there is not much hair left.
Between last year and this year, hair loss has been exponential. Folks who have not seen me post anything in months should not be surprised...
Both photos clicked by San.. last year I looked up.. this year didn't even know she was taking a picture. Was just trying to finish the pooja in time so the kids are not hungry. It was good to have both kids home this time to eat dumplings!
Wishing you all a wonderful {Ganesh, Vinayakar, Pillaiyaar} Chaturthi from all of us here!
While drinking the hot cocoa provided by Frozen Tony and waiting for the one taxi guy who was actually willing to take us back to Fairbanks, San and me both said this at the same time "Wish we could have some hot tea and samosas right now!"
We had already checked out Indian restaurants in the area earlier in the day.. Hari Om was the one with the best rating. So we asked our taxi to drive us to the restaurant. Given it was closer to the hotel we were hoping to get a taxi after dinner to take us to the hotel.. we were going to cross that bridge.. after some chai and dinner.
This restaurant was small, cozy, and the ambience, service and food were just amazing! I was naive enough to ask the owner "how do you get fresh corriander leaves in this weather ?" and his response was "this is America man. I can get anything here! not an issue". Then he went on to talk about how he gets to see the Northern lights from his bedroom window all the time and how the cold is something you get used to etc..
My mind was still elsewhere.. reliving my snowmobile experience. The food was just mouth watering. If you ever go to Fairbanks, don't miss this place. The dal tadka here was better than any I have had in a bay area restaurant. San thinks I rate desi restaurants better when the outside weather is too cold..like when we went to Banff! Maybe desi food tastes better when you walk into a restaurant after freezing your ass off. Maybe..
Do check it out if you hit Fairbanks. We did manage to get a taxi after dinner and Chai!
Pretty much covered everything we did in Alaska. There were not many things to do over a weekend and we did as much as we could given the time. Best part was we made it back to bay area and did not fall sick with a cold or flu or covid! After that Banff experience we were worried about that! Got lucky this time!
We have successfully seen the Northern lights, snowmobiled towards a gorgeous sunset and have had a nice dinner in a desi restaurant, no matter where we go!
We had started Friday afternoon to go from SFO to Calgary. We were coming back Monday afternoon. That meant we had half a day to spend on the return.
Given we were used to waking up early the last two days, we did the same on Monday, checked out and started driving towards Calgary from Banff.
First stop was Lake Minnewanka. We were pretty much the only folks there. We did a short hike around the lake and realized it was getting pretty hot and we were hungry.
There is a steam boat ride on this lake which is a family owned business (or so it appeared). When the family showed up, we started out of the park!
Our plan was to go to a place called Cochrane on the way to get ice cream at McKays. Every person we knew from this area had told us "do not miss this ice cream!"
Thing was that this shop opened at 10AM. We would be at least an hour early after we drove from Banff to Cochrane. We walked around the closed shops on what was the main storefront in this cute town and decided to have breakfast at a place called Sunny side up. The service was fast and the food and hot cocoa were excellent. We had managed to kill an hour.
Then it was ice cream time! The folks were right. This ice cream was delicious. It was finished in record time.
We were still too early for our flight. The new friends we made at ink pots, had suggested that we check out downtown Calgary on the way back if we had time. They had mentioned something about a Rodeo and Cowboy festival called Stampede that we might see.
We spent a good 15 minutes trying to find a parking spot. The whole place was festive! There were cowboy hat stores on the streets, everyone dressed up for the event, square dancing lessons on the street, etc.
We spent a good hour walking around downtown, checking out what I thought was Canadian crows (turns out they were part of the crow family), enjoying the skycrapers.. and we said a quick goodbye and went to the airport!
A video of the morning..
This was a good vacation. I was hesitant to go on such a hectic trip, but San convinced me to go! Good thing I listened.
We did get COVID the day after we landed and the next 10 days was a blank! Chances are we got it in SFO as masks were mandatory in Canada and optional in the US!
I for one am glad that these posts are delayed. COVID put a negative touch to the whole trip, but looking back, the trip in itself was amazing and we had a great time!
We will definitely visit Alberta again in a few years, just to go to Jasper National park and also spend a few more days instead of doing a "sampler weekend trip".
Now the blog has to catch up on a few more hikes we did locally!
