So, I’ve taken most of my summer vacation already … decided to head west this year for a conference and to see family.

It was fun, I have to admit, but I learned a lot too, so in the interests of sharing, here are Stephen’s collected thoughts from his two-week sojourn in Western Canada:

1.  Wow, is it ever sunny in the summer — the sun not setting until after 11 p.m. was something it would take me some time to get used to …

2.  This is a really young country, and the West is even younger than that.  I come from a place (Prince Edward Island) where we can trace our family trees back four, five, and maybe more generations.  Finding someone in Alberta with roots that deep is practically impossible, which gives the whole province a bit of a transient air about it.

3.  Until you’ve never paid PST, you probably don’t understand why the GST is such an affront to an Albertan, and you probably won’t understand why that promise was such a cornerstone of a recent political party’s platform.

4.  There’s a lot of oil in Alberta, but even after that has run out, there’s even more coal.  An abundance of fossil fuels probably has a way of making you feel pretty self-sufficient.

5.  The Badlands are very cool, but Hoodoos are shorter than you think.  For a six-year-old, however, it doesn’t get much better than the Royal Tyrell Museum.

And, finally, I learned that, for young kids, you can’t spend enough time with family — there’s something about blood being thicker than water that is never more manifest than putting kids together who haven’t seen each other in a while but who know that somehow they’re family and they therefore stick together.  It was wonderful to see.

So that’s my trip, in review.  We went to the Rockies, we went to the West Edmonton Mall, and we sang karaoke, but we did it together, and in the end, that’s what made it memorable.