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43 hours on a bus is a long time! Especially when you consider that in around 7 hours you could go from brighton to scotland! We tried to only sleep at night on the bus, to avoid mucking up our sleep patterns too much. Its pretty safe to say that theres not a lot to do on a greyhound bus, we spent most of the time reading, listening to music or talking to some of the other people on the bus. Lots of them were going to Vancouver which is near on a week of travelling on the same bus. If your going to take a long bus ride like this, take some food with you! We didnt and we ended up living on fast food for three days!
We arrived in Churchbridge, Saskatchewan in the afternoon and my (matts) uncle Charlie picked us up to take us back to my aunt and uncles house. When we got off the bus it was snowing, blowing a gale and about -12 which Charlie tells us is normal weather for this time of year!
Churchbridge is only a small town so there wasnt a lot of things to do. We took my aunt and uncles three dogs for a walk and played on the Wii most of the time. We went to a dinner theatre with Susan and Charlie one night in Esterhazy. Charlie arranged for us to go to Assasippi, a local ski hill with his manager and her two kids. It was quite a cool little hill, three chair lifts with about 12 runs down the side of a valley and two parks. It was sort of like an outdoor Sno!Zone but with way more to do and for only $35.
We returned to Esterhazy to watch a local hockey game, Esterhazy vs Langenberg. This was way better than watching the Milton Keynes team, while it was only amateur league these guys still knew what they were doing. Unfortunately Esterhazy lost but it was still a good game to watch.
The next day saw us going to Regina to catch the bus to Calgary overnight. We stopped off to see more relatives, my aunt Janet who took us to the RCMP museum. We then jumped on another bus to take us to Calgary, a 12 hour journey.
We got to Calgary at 6:30am and had another wait in the bus station. We had arranged to stay with Esther, an old school friend who now lives in Calgary with her mum and step-dad. They were kind enough to let us stay in their study for a week. That coupled with the week spent in Churchbridge allowed us to save quite a lot of money that would have been spent on accomodation which meant that we could afford to go up to Banff for the end of the ski season.
There wasn't a massive amount to do even though Calgary is a big city. Ester showed us around the nightlife, taking us to a keg party (bad idea) followed by paintball the next day (even worse idea) and then to a Dubstep gig. We spent the rest of out time organizing the impending trip up into the Rockies.
We managed to get ourselves spring passes for Sunshine Village that last until may for just over $300 which is really good value. We also managed to persuade a hostel to let us stay for three weeks for under $500, i think it works out to about $20 a night, much cheaper than the $30 they normally charge. So that was it, we were going to Banff for three weeks of snowboarding!
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