Highs and Lows in Vancouver

Cool Things I Saw Today

1. Krispy Kreme Donuts. We had never been to one before and were very excited to see and try a famous Krispy Kreme Donut. Yeah....it's a donut. I enjoyed my Timmies cookie much more.
2. My Uncle Fred and Aunt Helen. He is my Grandma T's twin, or womb-mate as I like to call him. They are really interesting people with a great home in Boundary Bay about two blocks from the ocean. We went there for supper...sorry....dinner tonight and had a great time. Their house is filled with beautiful antiques and lots of little nik naks from their world travels.
3. The Ocean! I know it is probably not cool to be as impressed with the ocean as I am, but that's the way it is folks. I get a thrill whenever I see it!
4. A jelly fish! ok....so it was dead on the sand, but it was a first for me anyways! I totally
felt it too! It felt just like I have always thought it would. Like a huge gummy bear. I did not lick it, so I can't say if it tasted like one or not, but I would suspect not.
5. A Family of Raccoons! They ran across the road in front of the truck! I LOVE raccoons! One year when I was a kid, my Grandpa shot a raccoon that was hanging around his barn. About a week later, I was in the barn with the hired man's kids and we heard a noise and looked around and there was about five or six staggering little raccoons coming out of one of the abandoned stalls. It was so sad. I wanted to keep one as a pet and my mom later said that she would have let me, but Grandpa killed them all. I guess that being a farmer you don't want to encourage pests, but I have always found them to be fascinating creatures. My friends and I took the babies out into the back pasture and gave them a Christian Burial.

Not So Cool Things I Saw Today

1. The Photocopier At Staples. I stared at it for what felt like hours as we photocopied stacks and stacks of home school stuff. It was really boring and tedious and most of the kids hated it. Andrew had fun because he got to use a paper cutter.
2. The Jelly Fish Ripping in Half. Not so much a sight thing but a texture thing. I had it held up on a stick so that Andrew could take pictures and it just pulled apart from the weight. I could feel the flesh ripping apart. Still makes me queasy.
3. Blood Pouring Out of Abby's Mouth. She somehow smashed her face into a new stool that we bought while she was putting it away and put her teeth through her lip. It is terribly swollen and very difficult for her to talk. She tore the leather like top of the stool as well and I am pretty sure she will lose the tooth which is OK because it was one of the top baby ones that she would be losing soon anyway.
4. My Baby Getting Stitches in Her Mouth. OK...one stitch, but it was traumatic for me. She was a little trouper, and I may have promised her a new Hannah Montana outfit for being so brave. I hate it so much when the kids are hurt.. I wish it would just happen to me instead. I am so much more experienced at it.

Idiot Day Update

Apparently I am more of an Idiot Day participant than I had intended to be. We went to church on Sunday, settled in, turned around to see the lay of the land noticed that in the very back seat of the church was the guy that I fought with at the KOA. OOPS. I felt a wee bit sheepish.

A Day For Idiocy

Little did I realize, this morning, when I awoke in Cochrane that it was National Idiots Day. The only thing I can think of to excuse myself is that I have a Saskatchewan calendar and I was in Alberta and British Columbia today. I figure that it must be one of those things like Family Day, where it was in Alberta for a few years and then slowly was adapted to the rest of our fair nation. We must have stumbled into some Far West Idiocy Pilot Project. It is the only thing that really makes sense.

To start off, Michael wouldn’t let me take the scenic route from Cochrane to Banff. He claimed that the shoulders were too narrow. So I trudged down the 22 and merged onto the Trans Idiot Highway. They actually renamed it just for today. How nice. As I merged, I was overtaken by a fit of sneezing. I graciously accepted a few choruses of “bless you” but admit that I did succumb to a wee bit of panic when Michael yelled “Honey, BRAKE!” after my last sneeze. Did I mention yet that I was towing a rather large trailer at the time? I can only say thank God that the trailer brakes were not working properly when we left the campsite and that we spent ten minutes resetting them. We needed them! I stomped that brake petal like a hairstylist pumping up a hefty guy in her chair! Who knew those years of hydraulic chair experience would ever come in so handy. We coasted to a stop with millimetres to spare and all breathed a sigh of relief. It turns out there was construction up ahead, but the construction signs were on the road before I merged, so I did not see them.

Then the crawl through the zone began. And I do mean crawl. Except for those few that had remembered to celebrate Idiot Day. They zipped past everyone and then expected to cut in line way up ahead. Man, I hate it when people do that. So I started straddling the centre line so people couldn’t get past. Fixed their little red wagon. I then noticed that the semi in front of me had been doing this strange swerving thing ever since I had been in behind him. He would go all the way to the centre, all the way to the side, all the way to the centre, all the way to the….you get the picture. I actually laughed for a while, because I thought he was just bored and trying to entertain himself. Shortly after we got going highway speed again it began to scare me a bit because he wasn’t stopping, so I pulled out and passed. This is when we realized that we had been following the Grand Marshal of the Idiots Day Parade! He was writing in his log book while driving a SEMI!!!

At our next pee break we popped into the camper to survey the damages. When we travel, the kids toy chests go into the kitchen and get bungee chorded to the pantry doors. For small breaking experiences and little hills this works well. However, when trying to avoid hitting semi trucks, it does not. Bungee chord is really, really stretchy. In case you were wondering, it does stretch enough to allow two toy chests of massive proportions to fall over and spill the drawers and contents of said toy chest all over a fairly large kitchen while taking out an 18L water bottle, garbage can and ladies bicycle in the process and still remain bungeed to the pantry. Impressive! And again, in case you were wondering, half a cup of sugar, with the right momentum CAN sift right between the cracks in a cabinet and cover a surprising area of said kitchen. This is when I decided to get in the spirit of Idiot Day and dragged out my vacuum on the side of the road to vacuum up the sugar. If you can’t figure out why that was an exercise in idiocy, Happy Idiots Day to you too!

Before we set out we had decided to stop in Golden for lunch, but on pulling into the town we saw a FasGas so we decided to pull in and fill up. Or rather, Michael decided and I pulled in. He is all about the Litre Log at the moment. So I pulled in and immediately started having trailer issues so Michael hopped out to direct me in. This was after waiting the ten minutes for the two diesels in front of us to get filled. As I started to pull forward, a guy pulled in to the other side, not close enough that he could actually get to the pump that he needed, but far enough in that I could not move without crunching him. Let me just say, the temptation was great. Michael went over and kindly asked him to move so that we could get through, but he refused, twice, because he didn’t want to lose his spot in line. Really? Neither did we! So there was a dude with a Harley in front of him whose wife was on the other side of the pumps. The guy in the car asked Harley to move because he was just standing there discussing things with his wife, and the wife went up one side and down the other about just waiting and they would be out when they were ready. So he put on his chaps and he snapped up his jacket, and he fiddled around in his trunk thingy and he put on his Harley bandana, and he unsnapped his jacket and he cleaned his sunglasses and he re-snapped his jacket with bandanna inside and finally was ready to go. The whole performance took at least fifteen minutes. Just as we were thinking the guy was about to get on his bike, a van whips around and backs in in front of us. Everyone layed on their horns, the van squealed out, and the Harley driver left.

By now we were all a little stressed and decided that we should call and make a reservation at a campsite so that there would be no surprises once we got to Revelstoke. I called the KOA since we have stayed there before and really liked it. Their reservation system was down but the guy answering phones assured me that he had hi-lighted me on their map and that I would get a 30 amp full service site. He didn’t want to write down my name or take my credit card info, but I finally convinced him to at least write my name down. It did no good. We got to Revelstoke, wound our way down, down, down into the campsite and went in to register. They had no record of our call and did not even believe that I had called. There was a very long and angry confrontation before we stormed out…and by stormed out I of course mean slowly drove out…of the KOA. The lady at the Lamplighter had no room but told us to go to the Canada West RV PARK where “he doesn’t answer the phone but almost always has room.” So we went there and found a sign that said “We’re open but not in the office. I’m out back working so come and find me.” You know what’s “out back”? Mountains. Mountains and bears. Well, we looked, but we did not find, and then another camper said that the owner would want us to just find a place and then let him know later. There was a huge gong show with tying to back the trailer in between the pines, but we are now settled in, pizza’d up, and climbing into bed. We also have a pool at this campground, so the kids are very happy.

I will however be making a recommendation to my Member of Parliament that they issue a travel advisory next year if this whole Idiot Day thing goes national.

You can take the girl out of PA....

Today we moved again. We have left Red Deer and our good friends the Relkov's behind and our new address is the Hoodoo RV Resort in Drumheller. It was great to see Bob and Ali again and really hard to leave. We did leave them some blue bunnies to remember us by, so it's all good. Five years melted away and we caught right back up and had a great time. About half of the time, Abby and Becca were best friends, and the other half of the time they were youngest sibling six year olds which translates into screaming banshees.
Michael and I fought the whole way to Drumheller over stupid stuff. I guess it is bound to happen, but it still sucks. We are almost at six weeks full time on the road now. This is our first stop where we are not visiting friends or family and it actually feels like a bit of a vacation. We went wading in the river today. Tomorrow we will explore some more. We plan to go to the Dinosaur Museum at some point this week. After here we head back to the Red Deer area to Erskine to visit with the Hall's. Why the backtracking? I don't remember. It made sense at the time, but not so much anymore. I think I am just bitter about the crappy drive here today.
Michael is setting up the projector outside for our first open air movie of the year. Abby has a couple of friends coming to watch with her and hopefully there will be more that show up. The girls that she is playing with were being super nasty to her a while ago and she came home sobbing. Silly girls....you don't mess with the mama bear's baby! I lost it and stomped over to the playground. They quickly came over apologizing. Michael looked at me quizzically and said "Did you go over there and open up a can or what?" I just smiled and said "Well, you can take the girl out of PA, but you can't take the PA out of the girl!"