by Thelma Thwartbender (attorney at law and gourmand)

travelling with James Raffan on the National Treasure Tour

Yum, yum, yum here I come with another tale of gastronomique delights from the road.  Jimmy's pal Morton Asfeldt, who has a little Danish blood in him, took us over to The Lefse House here in Camrose today to pick up some awesome Norwegian brown goat cheese called gjetost (pronounced "yet-toast" and tastes a whole lot better than it looks or sounds) and catch up over a truly Scandinavian lunch.   First course was rullepolse (a sort of savory head cheese) with melt-in-your-snoot pickled herring (not even going to try to say or spell that in Norwegian because it sounds rude in English) with Swedish rye bread, cloudberries, and a few delicious slices of the aforementioned gjetost.  That was followed by a sampler of dessert treats including hardanger lefse, krum kakes, fattigmann and sandbakkles—which with sweet tea and lashings of whipped cream played havoc with a girl's waistline but mmm-mmm good!

Arrived late in Edmonton (the good folks at Westjet, at their wit's end with a new electronic reservation system, couldn't figure out what happened to one passenger on the manifest so we sat for an hour on the tarmac 'til they called, counted, consulted, cajoled, counselled and finally crumpled up the list and printed a new one) but not so late as to miss the chance to check out a sculpture called "Caraval" on the lawn in front of Edmonton City Hall.  Here's Paddle Alberta President, Mark Lund, taking his turn as a paddler in this magnificent stainless steel canoe:

Of course, Edmonton has seen its fair share of canoes come and go on the mighty North Saskatchewan, and so it makes sense that there would be a canoe sculpture on the front lawn of city hall.  Here's what the artist, Isla Burns (good Scottish name that) had to say about the work on a plaque:  "The feel and tension of the sculpture derives from the 'canoe' shape, the relationship of the shape to the ground and the way it curves up from the ground.  The weight presses down on one end while the other end lifts up appearing weightless, creating a sense of movement.  The canoe shape itself speaks directly.  It talks about travel, going somewhere, coming from somewhere else, about history and timelessness." 

It's hard to say who was more excited—my friend Jimmy, who was reading this out loud to anybody passing by city hall at rush hour, or Edmonton's own Mr. Canoehead, Mark Lund, who had to get into the canoe and paddle with braces high and low (all with appropriate sound effects).  Tres tres embarassing!

When Mark Lund got the drift of Jimmy's seriously unbridled passion for these "vessels with out decks" (as he likes to call them when he's trying to sound like he knows what he's talking about)—in a kind of you-show-me-yours and I'll-show-you-mine schoolyard tit for tat, nothing would do but that Mark had to take Jimmy to his house to show him where he'd buried a 17' Grumman canoe in his front yard.  That's when this day's episode of the National Treasure Tour got just a little too weird.  The sight of these two white-bearded wonders making a fool of themselves in front of city hall was bad enough, but when they started to kneel and mumble prayers of support for the dear departed soul of the old Grumman, I had to excuse myself, feeling the contents of my stomach rising into my throat, and caught the first cab to the Edmonton Bar Association Steam and Sauna Club for good scrub down to remove any of this nasty canoe virus that might have rubbed off on me.  Seriously.  The guy buried a 17' aluminum canoe in his front yard!

What this Mark Lund guy lacks in horticultural sophistication, however, he makes up for in other areas, like how to host a fine National Treasure night in Edmonton. The auditorium at Grant MacEwen University was pleasantly filled with enthusiastic paddlers and interested others who, among other thoughtful gestures, brought canoe postcards to add to Jimmy's collection.  And, adding another international dimension to the Edmonton stop, Jimmy asked the person who'd come the farthest to attend the presentation to make the door prize draws. This turned out to be a woman from Minnesota! who was visiting friends in Edmonton and who had come along to the presentation to learn a bit more about the Canoe Museum.

From there it was off to Camrose, an hour or so SSE of Edmonton by car, with Professor Morton Asfeldt to spend the night in preparation for speaking to the University of Alberta, Augustana Campus students about canoes and risk.  According to Jimmy, Morton and his colleagues are keepers of one of the most thriving post-secondary outdoor education programs around, with regular local expeditions routinely heading out onto the rivers and mountain trails of Alberta in the spring, fall and winter (Morton spends 50-60 days a year on the trail with his students) and with biannual arctic expeditions as well heading up onto rivers like the Mara, Burnside, Firth and Thelon.  You can check out  Augustana's cool outdoor education programs here.  The canoe and canoe expeditioning is so integrated into curricular life at Augustana that there is a mural celebrating a school expedition to the Burnside River not far from the cafeteria in a wonderful new university centre on campus in Camrose.  I'm thinking it might be the gjetost that gives them that kind of get up and go! 

Oh yeah, not far from the mural there's a guy (whose identity has been masked in case his dean finds out that he's wrecking company equipment) who has another little canotic 'shrine' on the wall ... or is it some kind of strange brown-goat-cheese inspired Scandinavian art ... or is it just a whole other twisted story???  Only Ban Ki-moon knows for sure!