Disaster!

But Noah! This is your time that you are supposed to be backpacking the Bruce Trail with your friends for 5 days! Why are you posting?

Well, almost immediately after the hike started, my right hip started bothering me. Towards the end of the day, it had gotten rather painful. I woke up this morning with the same problem and while favoring that leg anyway, sprained my right ankle. The combination of the 2 problems was much more than I was willing to hike on the extremely rocky, slippery, and challenging terrain and so when we hit the next town I called for a pickup. The other 3 guys are continuing the hike. The dream will have to wait at least one more year I guess.

I left my camera with them for extra pictures so I don't have any to post at the moment. They will have to come later. The ~30 hours I did spend on the trail were awesome, despite the pain in my right leg, and I look forward to the time where I can actually finish it.

Gus and Cassie: Water Pros

I introduced Gus and Cassie to the lake on their first or second night here, but the waves splashed them and they weren't fans. Last night, however... the lake was beautifully calm. I carried each one of them out and reintroduced them to the water, and after a bit of encouragement...

Pictures!

Me again,

Ryan worked some wonders at the cottage and we now have wireless, albeit painstakingly slow at times... which means I can get our pictures off of my laptop and onto the web!

I'm going to edit my 2 previous posts to have pictures included so as not to break up the timeline.

Cheers!

My how time flies!

I'm down to a week of vacation, and Noah still has like... 3?! Not fair! Alas, paying the bills does sometimes have to involve doing things other than sitting around, tanning, and enjoying cold drinks. So I hear, anyway.

Last week was loverly. Hard to believe that we've been here so long! I would highly recommend long summer vacations.

When we got in last Friday, we moved in, visited, and passed out. Deb's getting a lot of work done on the cottage, and it looks great. She even found this really nice carpenter who is SUCH a hard worker, he spends the night so that he can get up early and keep working. Right Deb?

6 of our friends drove in to spend the weekend, arriving on Saturday and staying until Sun/Monday. It was awesome to see so many familiar faces; we had a lot of fun on the beach with some baseball and body surfing, plus lots of tanning and excellent wine thrown in for good measure. Katie and Eric had to leave Sunday evening, as Katie had to get back to the real world and "work"... a very sad evening. On Monday we took Pratik, Joe, Danielle, and Mark climbing in the Old Baldy Conservation area; the 5.8 that was in the book was definitely NOT a 5.8 by our standards! It was a cool climbing area, with pretty cool rock, but the route was also a lot newer than the more established TABVAR routes in Banff. Noah pulled off a rock about the size of his chest that could have done some serious damage if it hadn't been a controlled throw. Noah also had his first lead climb fall-- it was from right up below the anchor spot, so he didn't ground fall, but it was a long drop. He fell about 25 feet, and I was yanked about 6 feet up... yeesh! Mark and Pratik had to leave a bit early, but Danielle and Joe joined us for dinner afterwards, then had to head back to Toronto.

Noah and I stayed at Sauble Tues-Thurs around lunch, then drove down to Grand Bend to see Jim and Jan, where we enjoyed some gorgeous sunsets, a lovely bonfire, and excellent food and company. We went to a new pub in Bayfield and looked around their main street for awhile (Erin and Jessie, you would have bought the place out).

On Saturday we drove down to Detroit for Ryan and Christina's wedding. We made it to Jenni's house with just enough time for everyone to change, get all the dogs crated, and get to the ceremony. They looked gorgeous, and very happy; then Christina's family hosted a reception at a nearby backyard, and we made it back to Jim's house pretty late.

Sunday was devoted to figuring out when to leave based on when the wait time at the border crossing was the shortest. We wound up sticking around for most of the day, doing some shopping and having lunch with Jim and Jan at a nice little Italian place. When we did cross the border, around 7:30, there was no wait to get into Canada, which was awesome, but the line to get into the US was at least 4 miles long... ouch.

Now we're back at Sauble, and aren't planning on leaving until Noah has to drive me to Kitchener to catch my flight back to Alberta. We'll be doing a bit more climbing, and attending a few more wedding celebrations for Ryan and Christina up here... it's going to be a rough week, I can tell :-)

p.s-- Dad, they're not ratdogs!

Ahh... the beach.

So, Noah and I had all sorts of plans to post each night of our roadtrip from Banff to Sauble Beach. We were going to post pictures... talk about crazy things we saw... it was going to be awesome.

Alas, it didn't happen. On Tuesday after I worked until 4pm, we drove from Banff to Cochrane to pick up my dogs, then on to Medicine Hat, where we spent the night with my Aunt and Uncle.


Wednesday was looooong. We were out of the house by 6:30am, and made it to the Wild Horse border crossing into the US around 7:45. We had to wait for the border guards to open shop (precisely at 8am), and they proceeded to take as long as possible to check our car; not because we were threatening, but because we were probably the only people going to cross at that location that week. We were cleared, the dogs were cleared, but their dental chews almost didn't make it across-- the smily face on the front "looked like arabic writing", so we exited the car while they looked through the back. Lovely.

Montana was a long haul, filled with many exciting locations! Noah and I played a game where we had to point out things outside of the car following the alphabet. It's harder than it sounds considering the only things we had were the road itself, the sky, and the fields (Asphalt! Bovine! Cattle! ............... the rest took us awhile).

We were nervous about the first few hours in Montana because that was our only time not on the interstate in the US, but those little roads were actually great. Traffic free, 70mph on a perfectly straight, flat road as long as the eye can see... lovely.

We finally made it out of Montana and into North Dakota. The first 40 miles were beautiful, the badlands a lot more dramatic than in Montana. Unfortunately, the next 300 miles looked a lot like the same boring little bit between Edmonton and Calgary (or London and Sarnia) over and over and over. We stopped at a city just before Minnesota for dinner, then made it to our goal destination of St. Cloud, Minnesota around 11:30pm. If we don't use Onstar again all trip, using it that once to call ahead, exhausted, asking for a pet-friendly hotel on the interstate in St Cloud, having a reservation made, and exact directions (exit 171, take an immediate left, look past the home depot and it's on your right...) was worth the $20 it cost extra this month.

We passed out right away, but the dogs sure didn't. They had been in their crates for about 16 hours and were wired.

On Thursday morning, we met up with Andre, a friend of ours from university who is a choir conductor in St Cloud now. It was a great start to the day, which was shaping up to be a good one: breakfast with a dear friend in the morning, and the promise of home cooked ribs with another friend, Lori, if we could make it all the way to Kalamazoo that night. Fortunately, we did, despite the brick wall of traffic we hit in Chicago. We actually left the interstate in favour of surface roads and went through a pretty harsh neighbourhood, but it was great because we were actually Moving.

Lori and Kevin hosted us that night at their gorgeous home near Three Rivers and the ribs were everything she promised and more. The dogs got some good outside time, too, which was nice for them (and a lot of lap time with Kevin). We slept in on Friday, not getting on the road until about 10, because... we were almost there.

We made it to Sauble around 5pm, and it was wonderful. We got out of the car, took out the dogs, changed into swimsuits, and ran into the lake. It was cold, but good. The dogs had a noticeable change to them; they instantly -settled- like they hadn't done while we were travelling. They get along well with Eddi (Noah's mom's dog), and we took them for an awesome hike while rock climbing yesterday.

So, 2200 miles later, we made it, and have spent some wonderful quality time with friends and family. Vacation is awesome. I highly recommend it.

If I can fix my laptop to accept Noah's camera card, I'll post some pictures later!