Monday, February 22, 2010

Silver Skate Festival - A great way to spend a winter weekend!


On Sunday afternoon, I experienced the Edmonton Silver Skate Festival and have to say it was great fun!

With blues skies and plenty of sunshine, the abundance of free events and hundreds of smiling faces made it a fantastic way to spend the day.

The Silver Skate Festival is the longest running winter festival in Edmonton is rooted in the Dutch tradition of a love of the outdoors and an appreciation for culture. In recent years the festival has expanded to suit Edmonton’s multicultural population.

In addition to watching ice dances and theatre performances there are plenty of activities for all the family to join in. We had hours of fun whilst ice skating, practising sledge hockey and sculpting a family ice house!

For those that are new to Canada or to the snow, this is a fantastic place to be introduced to some of our winter sports, with opportunities to snowshoe, cross country ski, ice skate and even enjoy a horse drawn sleigh ride. For the kids there is an ice slide, family snow-sculpting, clowns and face painting!

And here’s the fun part ... it is all free! (Donations are accepted).

If you missed out, it’s a little too late to experience the Silver Skate Festival this year; but look out for this fabulous family weekend in 2011!

For more information go to Silver Skate Festival


Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Take the strain out of group travel ...




Organising a vacation for a group of friends or family is a great idea; you get to travel with people you know and like and you get to go to where you want to visit and include things that you want to do!


Unfortunately, choosing the destination quite often is the only easy part! Organising family and friends often brings more headaches that you originally anticipated; who knew that Aunty Bertha was allergic to feathers, dust, cats and peanut butter and that Uncle Bob snored incessantly?

An ideal way to take away the stress is to let Urban Insight Travel organise your Alberta group travel for you.

We recently organised a ‘girl’s weekend’ to Jasper. Not only did we arrange the accommodation and transportation, we also organised activities and made reservations for dinner.

Accommodation arrangements alone can be a difficult subject. We booked this group into three housekeeping rooms, each with three or four guests in a room. The rooms had a full kitchen, two queen beds and a sofa bed, which allowed those early risers to be able to get up and put the coffee on, before the others woke up!


Our group of ten females consisted of two skiers and eight snowshoers; five of which required snowshoe rental. Later four of the group enjoyed spa treatments, while the rest spent free time at the hotel hot tub.

The result? Ten happy travellers that still remained friends when they returned home!

Contact Urban Insight Travel for assistance with your group vacation at 1-888-756-2035 or go to Urban Insight Travel for more information.