Going to Canada eh ?

David has now started school in Grade 5. There are two types of school here the public schools which are state funded and the Catholic Schools which are also state funded. House owners are asked to nominate which school they want to get the benefit of their property taxes. There is also a small contribution from parents. The fees for the first term were about $80.

There was no uniform list but instead parents have to buy all supplies and are issued with a very specific list which includes 60 HB pencils. They must be Venus but we scoured Red Deer and could not find any. We are hoping David doesn’t get into trouble with the pencil police but are also wondering how he will get through more than one pencil a week.

He catches a bus from from very near our flat to the school and back each day however the return journey seems to take over an hour so I guess there are lots of drop offs on the way.

A feature of highways over here is the weave zone.

This is where two motorways join using a clover leaf junction.

On the lower level of the this junction there is short stretch of road under the flyover where traffic accelerating to join the motorway has merge with traffic decelerating to leave the motorway.

This quite alarming and one wonders how they manage to avoid having accidents.

The other day a petrol tanker rolled over on Highway 2 causing the motorway to be closed in both directions and all the traffic was diverted through Red Deer just at going home time.So for a few hours Red deer was twinned with Guildford.