Last post we shared about our trip to San Diego and Disneyland. But it was far from the only trip we had in the summer of 2019.
On coming back from our trip to California we had Uncle Richard in town, staying for a bit over a week. Helen and Daniel were coming a few days later because they had been travelling in China. But not letting moss grow under their feet, the girls left for Kamloops with Uncle Jim and Jessica on the Thursday, just 2 days after we got back from California. Jessica would be staying to for a week with Rebecca in Kamloops while our girls (in order to see cousin Daniel and Auntie Helen) were coming back on Sunday. To achieve this on the Sunday Glen drove to the toll booth to pick up the girls who were driven there by Glen’s parents. The Britton Creek rest stop, where we had lunch, was filled with travellers some in strange cars.
The girls and dad drove back just in time for a big family BBQ at our house, and a whole lot of eating with lots of food during the week Richard and family were here (with just an occasional bit of exercise thrown in).
On Sunday a couple of days after it opened Kayla and dad took the bus to the PNE. Susan and Melissa went shopping for the day. We got in cheap, for only $2 / ticket as there was a discount if you had the PNE app installed on your phone (and for a savings of $16 / ticket, I was happy to install the app for a few hours).
While at the PNE we saw the Superdogs show. We went and visited the CTV booth and had our picture taken with Jon Montgomery from the Amazing Race Canada (well, at least a cardboard cutout of him). We didn’t just get pictures taken with cardboard cutouts, we actually did meet (and take a picture with) the real Keri Adams and Krissy Vann. Keri is the morning anchor for CTV News Vancouver, and Krissy also a reporter on the morning show. As the anchor of a show I reasonably often watch, Keri strikes me as intelligent and friendly, and she was that in real life. I’m a bit of a bumble with small talk when meeting new people (as I’m sure you all know), and I felt that way when talking with Keri, but she was friendly all the same.
Glen took some allergy medicine to avoid horse allergy problems which allowed us to go see jousting and pig races. We saw the farm animals in the barn, including a very big pig (which I didn’t get a good picture of), a very big cow, and spent some time at the bee booth. Can you believe they take a random volunteer from the crowd, spend a few minutes in preparation with them, and then place them on display in a sealed booth and give them a bee beard! Can you imagine volunteering for that? I’m not sure I would want to do that…
We went and saw Mama Lou, one of the world’s few strong woman shows, showing feats of strength and doing things like ripping up card decks and squashing (popping?) apples in her biceps. You thought getting locked in a sealed display case and having a bee beard is bad? Mama Lou’s show had something even more people would probably want to skip… They had this poor guy from the crowd go up on stage, playing along that he was an evil nemesis of Mama Lou, and had to wear an orange leotard and have a phone book tearing duel (proving that the phone book was real by not being able to rip it in half while she did). Why do I describe this in detail? “That guy” was Glen! Sadly Kayla didn’t get any pictures, I think she was more trying to sink into her seat hoping that no-one she knew would see her and find out that her dad was on stage wearing an orange leotard in a phone book ripping duel with Mama Lou! In conversation after the show, although strong and playing a bit of comedy to make a good show, Mama Lou was a nice lady.
Our time at the PNE wasn’t all high energy, we spent some time by the Lake.
We watched a bit of glass blowing and finally took the bus home.
One evening we went for a bike ride to Dairy Queen at Kensington for some ice cream, and we sent the girls in by themselves to make the purchase. I think it was the first time for them both where they went into a store by themselves and made a purchase without adult help. Thanks for the ice cream girls (OK, admittedly dad gave them the money).
The last weekend in August (ignoring the labour day weekend which will have the Saturday on the 31st) we went for our annual trip to Alice Lake with our friends Jen and Zac and their kids and about 40 of their closest friends. We had an excellent weekend as usual, although it was a bit rainy on the first day we were there. Other than the fun and good memories, I think one phrase that could describe the weekend was “bad estimating”. Glen convinced half a dozen parents to go for a hike from the campsite to Cheekye Creek. The word was we could get there in about 20 minutes. It wasn’t a huge problem, but it took us about 45 minutes to get there. But it was far from the only misestimate. The second I believe was preparation for lunch. Every year each campsite (usually 2 families per site) is assigned one meal for which they cook the meal and clean the dishes. We had Saturday lunch with Jen and Zac. We planned for lunch about 12:30. We ended up serving the meal at about 2:00. Oops! Then on Sunday morning (the day we would leave even though the campground was booked through to Monday) we went for a mountain bike ride. Rumour was we were going for an hour. It was more than three hours before we all made it back. Once again, we were the last to checkout.
One more piece of trivia about the Alice Lake trip. Mice! We suspect that when we served the meal on Saturday, we brought some mice back into our trailer in a chip bag. Melissa was the first to notice one on Saturday evening when she went in to get ready for bed. Due to our misadventures with a mouse earlier in the year at Sasquatch Provincial Park we had traps so immediately set them out. In order to try to force the mouse (all we knew about at the time) to eat the cheese in the trap, we though we would carefully examine each package of food we had in our trailer and (hopefully) transfer it without a mouse to the truck. We failed! Yes, we moved all food to the truck and saw no mouse. We obviously did a shoddy job of our search, for when Susan went to the truck to get some food she saw a mouse running around in the truck. We moved a couple of traps from the trailer to the truck. An hour later I took a look and we had caught a mouse in the truck. “Great, we got him!” I thought. I asked Susan to get me my truck keys from in the trailer so I could get rid of the caught mouse. She went in the trailer and reported that a trap in the trailer had caught another mouse. I got rid of the one in the trailer, and then went to get the one out of the truck. While doing that I saw another mouse running around in the food boxes in the truck!
I got rid of the first two and left out some traps in both the trailer and the truck. When we got up in the morning we had another caught in one of the traps in the truck!
That seemed to have been all, we never caught anymore all weekend, and had the traps out this past week while home and didn’t catch anything else. It did take a long time for us to unpack though as we upped our scrutiny in examining everything we brought in from the trailer to the house, so it took us about 3 hours on the night we came home, and then another hour a few days later when we completed emptying out the trailer and winterizing it.
Summer isn’t over, we have a cabin visit planned for this coming weekend, Labour Day, and then the girls are back in school. All for now!