Tag Archives: Canada

Travel

Why You Should Get Travel Insurance

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As you may have heard, our recent trip to Canada with Lucy didn’t quite go according to plan. As babies are prone to do, Lucy has been picking up all sorts of coughs and colds, annoying, but not usually too much of a problem. Unfortunately for us she picked up a really nasty one in Canada, a respiratory syncytial virus or RSV which clogged up her chest with mucus leaving her struggling to breath without coughing.

Not surprisingly that left us taking a trip to the local hospital twice during the trip, the second time being the day before we were due to head home when the doctors said that she was unfit to fly and decided to keep Lucy and Beth in hospital, Lucy on Oxygen and Ventolin. Ultimately they had to stay an extra ten days until the infection cleared up, and the doctor was happy to clear them to fly.

The way the travel insurance policy works is that the policyholder pays direct expenses, including any outpatient or emergency room costs, and the the hospital and insurance company settle directly for any inpatient treatment. We’d already paid and claimed for the emergency room visit – $560 CDN as the Alberta health service charges a flat daily rate for visits to the emergency room – plus assorted other sundry expenses for follow up visits to the doctor and for medication, but since the hospital and insurance company were settling up directly, we hadn’t seen the final cost. However this morning an invoice turned up from the hospital, which they’d incorrectly sent to the patient address rather than the insurance company – $6797 CDN in total for the hospital stay bringing the grand total for the whole illness to $7623 CDN, just over £4300. For friends and family in Alberta it’s been a bit of an eye opener too, as they just hand over their Alberta Health card and never see the bills.

All of which dwarfs the size of even a single trip travel insurance policy – and remember we were lucky in that the insurance company weren’t having to pay for extra accommodation, or for special flights back. True you might never need it, but we’re sure glad we had a good travel insurance policy…

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology, iPhone

Rip-Off Britain? Not With The iPhone 3G

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One of the favourite descriptions of the UK, especially amongst it’s inhabitants, is Rip-Off Britain, indeed there is even an entire website devoted to the subject. Whilst there are loads of things that cost more in this country, hence why we quite often go shopping when we visit Canada, it is not everything that is cheaper abroad.

Thanks to the massive competition in our domestic mobile phone market, the deal we are being offered on the 3G iPhone seems to be one of the best around, indeed it seems positively generous compared to the deals in in Canada where there is no competition at all in the market, and New Zealand where there are only two players.

In the UK, on the higher cost plans we’re getting the phone for free, down in New Zealand users of every plan have to cough up for the phone. Both the operators in Canada and New Zealand are applying hard limits to data – over here we have unlimited data usage.

Not surprisingly it doesn’t take much to find potential purchasers in the two countries who are less than happy. About the only complaint I’ve heard over here is that users are tied to O2…

Movies & TV, Pictures, Travel

Canada Trip Pictures and Video Clips

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Both Beth and myself have now got all of our pictures uploaded to Flickr, and in my case some of the videos. You can find my set of pictures here and the pictures Beth took are here.

There are more videos to come, but amongst the interesting stuff so far are a bit of a modern day cattle round-up – Beth getting the quad bike is here, then clips of the actual round up are here and here.

Following on from the round up, is some video of the auction at which the cattle that were rounded up were actually sold. Quite how anybody follows what the auctioneer is actually saying I don’t know, as it all sounds like gibberish to me – aside from the point when one of the bidders queries something, and then the final price (which is not the price for the complete lot – cattle is sold by weight).

Here are slideshows for both mine and Beth’s pictures:


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Travel

The Canadian Gravel Experience

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So we’ve been back on British soil for about a day after taking advantage of the early Easter to spend the school holidays in Canada. I’m slowly working through the pictures – delights to come include a bit of a cattle round-up, a cattle sale, plus a little bit of Canadian winter driving courtesy of their very own late season snowfall that we drove through on our way back to the airport.

By way of a taster, here is a slightly different drivers eye view to the one we took in the UK a couple of weeks ago. This one is a sample of the Canadian Gravel Road experience. Some of the lesser used roads are maintained with a gravel surface, although in some cases they could be regarded as fairly important, for example the most direct route from Buffalo to Oyen in south-east Alberta is gravel.

Anyway, this is the last seven or so miles of the drive to Beth’s parents ranch, so also gives an idea of the kind of countryside around where Beth grew up, and also shows that despite what one or two of Beth’s classes might have thought, she wasn’t taking pictures to avoid the trees. The prairie landscape is pretty typical of what you see around the area, with the only significantly treed areas being the river valleys. You also get somewhat of an idea of what Beth means when she talks about the “big sky” out on the prairie.

Slightly atypically we do actually pass another vehicle on the road, as the fuel truck had just made a delivery. It’s also worth pointing out that the prairie isn’t always this colour – on other occasions the same views will be green or white as far as the eye can see, depending on the time of year. This being the early spring view, currently the new green grass growth is hidden by last years dried grass – subject to the right amount of rain the same trip would look rather different.

A couple of other notes, the beeping part way down is the sat-nav deciding to reset itself for no apparent reason, and the vehicle we’re using is a second generation Toyota Highlander. Camera was my normal Fujifilm F50d.


Canadian Gravel from Richard Peat on Vimeo.

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Flickr Stats Clears Up a Mystery

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Untouched Snow

Although by making use of internet search tools I can track some usage of my pictures on Flickr – for example I have a saved technorati search that looks for sites referencing my Flickr URL that is common across all public pictures – compared to the level of statistics I can get for visits to any of my websites, information in the past has been rather limited.

What you might have missed though, is that Flickr now has a stats feature of it’s own – see this blog posting for the announcement – which was added to the site at the tail end of last year. It takes a few hours to get the information generated once the feature is turned on, but after that you get all sorts of interesting stuff about which pictures are popular, when and from where.

What it has allowed me to do, is clear up a bit of a mystery about one of my pictures. Most pictures tend to only get a few views – generally well below 100 for a snapshot. Some have had big bursts of interest because they were topical – this picture of the two-minute silence after the London Bombs for example. Others have been picked up by popular groups so get steady traffic, such as my picture of Wild Goose Island and St Mary Lake. However even the most popular of these are between 800 and 900 views. The one exception is the picture above, a picture of untouched snow at the ranch, that has a total viewings of over 3000 – even searching for the picture URL I couldn’t find where it was being used.

What the stats have now allowed me to find out is that a staggering 3070 viewings, that’s 79% of the total have come from the Canadian Yahoo Weather site – looking at the page it has a little boxout with weather pictures taken from Flickr. The picture isn’t in the current set – it’s only been viewed 4 times in the past month, but at least I now know where all the viewings came from!