Canadian Tour (of the immediate Calgary Area)
You travel your own area a lot more when you're showing it to someone else. Before Katya and I moved to the UK for 2 years, one of our British friends, Malcolm, came over to Calgary for a quick tour. First off we had Calgary Comic Con. Our local re-enactment group, the Sons of Fenrir, set up a village on the Stampede grounds so we got to hang out at the wic for our last show in Canada. The first day was was the parade, walking through Calgary with a host of other costumed individuals. Then most of the day we were working on sewing projects and chatting with Sons. We also made the startling discovery that Malcolm and Halvard, one of the Sons, looked astonishingly similar, to the point where Halvard had seen a photo of Katya, Malcolm, and myself and had thought that it was a photo of him with us from the previous year. This lead to the re-naming of British-Halvard and Canadian-Malcolm and caused many double takes throughout the weekend.
The second day we got to take part in more of the convention. Katya and I were in our Merry and Pippin cosplays, which seemed fitting considering that Elijah Wood, Frodo, was one of the celebrity guest. Last year I had bought a replica Lord of the Rings sword, a very impulse purchase, and so this year I vowed to not buy another one. However, that didn't stop me from looking and drooling over various displays. My costume was slightly lacking since I seemed to have misplaced my ears at some point and our efforts to find new ones were unsuccessful. Other than wandering the various halls and hearing a bunch of scientific panels, the main feature of the day was Jeff Goldblum's panel. Elijah Wood's panel was on Sunday and I think that that sticks our as my highlight of the weekend. Mainly, when he told us that one of his funniest moments on set was during the first day of filming, when they were rolling down the hill to avoid Farmer Maggot, upon landing he confessed to releasing a huge "impact fart" which had the whole crew in stitches. I don't think I'll be able to watch that scene in the same way again. He also expressed his sadness at the cancelation of Dirk Gently but he wants to get the writer to released his plans for season 3 to at least give us some closure.
The rest of the week we took a lot of photos. On days where the weather was less than ideal we used my very cobbled together studio, consisting of Rachael's wedding backdrop, Ryan's black flat sheet from his bed, a fan, a speed light and my reflector which together acted as a handheld soft box, and my camera on a tripod. We managed to get some really dramatic photos and accidentally kicked off the #regiasbesthair competition. For photos with more of a background we then spent a day and headed out to Banff and Lake Louise.
I am going to miss the mountains. Even though I'm not much of a hiker or outdoorsman, I love driving and walking around the mountains. They are gorgeous backgrounds for weddings, portraits, or for us, viking photoshoots. We walked around Banff, had bison burgers and beaver tails, toured the Banff Springs Hotel, and then headed to Lake Louise and got into kit. You get a few odd looks but most people are more occupied with their own mountain selfies to worry about a few odd balls. Malcolm fell through the snow with almost every step. It was insanely bright out so many of the photos had us squinting or in sunglasses and I even managed to get a bit sunburnt.
For our last day before Malcolm headed up to Edmonton for the weekend, we headed out east to Drumheller, to visit the Royal Tyrell Dinosaur Museum. This is probably the most excited Katya gets going into a museum, even though she knows most of the stuff on the placards already. We wandered around the fossils and then out back to the Badlands trail, avoiding as many school groups as we could. We did a quick stop beside the world's tallest dinosaur before heading to a ghost town, population 28 people, for lunch at their 100 year old hotel. It definitely felt like the beginning of a horror movie but the burgers were good so the potential murdering would have been worth it. We walked around the hoodoos, fancy rock formations, while some band was filming a music video in the back. I hope I never see that music video.
It was great having Malcolm over to show him around our bit of the world before heading back to the UK. Of course, now that he's met my family he knows too much and may have to be eliminated before that information can spread.