> This weekend, I went to a wedding between a now-not-so-close-as-previously friend and a regular (!) friend. Starting out directly from work on Friday, it involved slightly less than 1000km travel before the wedding started at 15:00 (3 PM) on Saturday. The first 700 km I went by train, which took 5 1/2 hours. This type of travel is only feasible because I work in a large city and the high-speed train travelled to another large city*. Next morning, I borrowed my girlfriend's parents' car, went to pick up a few others and drove the remaining distance in 3 hours (including lunch).
>

!! Sounds a lot like my holiday this year. :-) Two weekends ago, my immediate family and I went to a wedding in Vancouver, British Columbia. One of my many cousins was getting married. Starting out directly in the morning on Friday, it involved slightly more than 3700 km of travel west before the wedding started at 17:00 (5 pm) on Saturday. The first 3700 km I went by plane, flying on a Boeing 767 cruising at an altitude of 37000 feet, which took 4 1/2 hours and crossed three time zones and two mountain ranges. This type of travel is convenient (well okay, air travel is 'serviceable,' if not exactly comfortable... only because I live on the East coast of a country where it's much cheaper to go to Europe than to go and see my cousins in western BC). That same afternoon, we rented a 2001 Dodge Caravan (minivan) good enough for seating seven people and, after dropping our junk and stuff off at the hotel, drove the remaining 50 km around in circles, until we found a highway exit that led to where my cousins lived. Lasting impressions of the drive: Vancouver is really, really green. It's the City of Rhododendrons, cedar hedges, and dwarven date palm trees (Palm trees in Canada -- woohoo!) and it has lots of rainy, humid air -- but minus the tropical heat. In fact, my British aunt and uncle say they originally moved from England to British Columbia specifically because "Vancouver climate is so much like England's and you get mountains beside"!

The wedding itself was uneventful, save for some minor panic at the reception wherein certain guests thought the meal being served was entirely vegetarian.


> We could have taken the train (would have been just as fast), except that our friends live in a very rural area,

I suppose we could have taken a car or van across Canada instead of a plane. In fact, that's what my in-laws do whenever they go out West; and that's exactly what they're doing right now. Dave and I took the Dodge Caravan and drove over the Coastal mountains (more green!) and last week we met up with my m-i-l and f-i-l in the city of Golden, British Columbia, with us having travelled east some 700 km from Vancouver, BC; and them driving some 4300 km west coming from Montreal, Quebec in their Ford Aerostar (another minivan). Got to admit that's a VERY long way to drive to meet people who normally live 3.5 km away from my house.

On a more sobering note, during the plane trip over the Prairies, I noticed that in contrast to the green of BC, the drought in Alberta has been so devastating that the would-be crop fields are a parched and sickly yellow-brown. There are huge erosion troughs extending for kilometers which open up along old stream banks. This is a huge difference compared to the vibrant wheat fields I saw, when I took the same plane flight five years ago. Back then, there were even some crop circles drawn in a few fields. Now, there's thousands of acres of nothing. It was even more shocking for me when I got to Banff National Park in Alberta. Lake Louise is there, its inlet fed directly by the tailend of Victoria Glacier, and previously I had been able to touch the glacier runoff (it feels like flour toothpaste). The brilliant aqua-green of Louise's water was still there; the colour typical of all glacially-fed lakes. But the Victoria Glacier itself was just... gone. It's now receded away something like one kilometer backwards in less than five years.

Maybe this is just a dry set of years. However, my f-i-l has seen Lake Louise several times since the Sixties and he does say the glacier has gotten smaller. If it continues, this seems like a critical climate-change indicator which may turn very, very serious. I think there's currently more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than in the last three million years. The warming of the greenhouse effect is having a distinct effect on global weather patterns (El Niņo and Niņa, monsoons and cylones, etc.)


> Regarding gas, the car goes around 10km per liter,

Don't European cars have more fuel-efficient engines? Our 1996 Cavalier coupe goes 12 km per liter, the last time I calculated it; the Dodge Caravan was doing 9 km per liter, and I don't know what a typical four-wheel drive SUV or a Boeing 767 does ;-)


> and the price is just below 9 DKR per liter, which for 300 km equates to 270 DKR = 30 USD

Gasoline. One thing that surprised us: the price of gas in Montreal is around 79-82 cents per liter, and a large part of that is tax (around 38%). When we got to BC and Alberta, the price of gas was ***drum roll*** 80-82 cents per liter, 42% tax. We were promised that Alberta -- which us Easterners sometimes like to call "The Land of Oil Barons and the Free" -- was supposed to have gas at around 62 cents per liter. Instead, the best we could find was 78.5 cents, and sources in Banff informed us that the price of gasoline had, in fact, jumped to 92.9 cents (!!!) in Calgary during a brief "gas shortage" scare. Aw. I really don't get this since the price of gas OUTSIDE of Montreal, but inside Quebec, is around 76-80 per liter.

So now we know that SOMEBODY is getting stinking rich off the oil-processing industry, right across Canada at least, and it isn't the petrol-pump stations (who only make a 2% profit).

Wolf "parkay" spirit