Notes from the Happy Trails, Days 5-8
Sep. 4th, 2008 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ciroccojDays 5: Vancouver, Lethbridge
Said goodbye to Dennis and Vancouver. Justin, who loves babies and younger kids, had taken an interest in Dennis, and had come to tell us, very excited, every time he'd managed to have some kind of interaction with him.
"He looked at me!"
"He smiled at me!"
"He said Thank you!"
I don't have any pictures of Dennis, so I'll have to ask Trinh, because the two I took were unrecognizably blurred.
Took a plane to Lethbridge, which is a small town in Alberta that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
batita expressed great fondness towards. ::cough::
Day 6: Kayaking
Sadly, kayaks and cameras are not generally likely to be best of be friends. So we didn't bring ours. But we had a great time, kayaking about 5 hours in a river near Lethbridge.
I don't know if any of us had kayaked before. I know I hadn't. And we'd expected all the kids to be with adults, but there were only two double kayaks, so Emma went with my father, Justin went with me, and Daniel said, "Yeah, I can handle a kayak on my own."
Not My Kid.
He didn't do so well at first - couldn't get the hang of the thing, kept getting involuntarily turned around, snagged on rocks, and lagged behind the rest. Same as me, only I had Justin in my kayak so I also had to keep my cool and not pitch the hissy fit I was aching to pitch.
Happens so, so often in parenting: you not only have a hell of a time coping with something nigh-uncopable, but you also have to do so With A Smile, because you've got a little person who will be totally crushed if their parent loses it, and it's not just All About You.
Daniel had no such obligation and so he pitched a few hissies, and nobody could really blame him. One of the guides finally connected their kayaks together for a while, and gave him a bit of time to collect himself.
And then the kid gathered himself up, decided to try again, and bloody well learned to kayak.
As my dad said, "Daniel is my hero today, you know?"
Again: Not My Kid.
Emma was also not doing terribly well for a while there - it was cold, it was tough paddling, they kept getting snagged. The weather wasn't the only thing clouding over; her expression was more than a little stormy for a while there. And yet she also gathered herself up and was able to enjoy herself, despite the cold. Neat kid.
At the barbecue at the end of the kayaking, she said once again, "I still don't quite believe you're my sister."
"Well, you may not believe it, but I'm starting to. I would've been just like you during the kayak thing, except I wouldn't have been able to cheer up like you did."
A thoughtful look greeted this revelation ;)
No kayaks, but the Wuthering Heights weather was about this cheery:
Day 7: Horsies!
Our first serious day on horseback. Here's a shot of our cowboy guide, Trinh on Tess, Justin on Skeeter, Daniel on Peanuts, and Emma on Ginger.
The ranch is in a beautiful location. Look to the West, and you see mountains that would make any Ontario skiier swoon, but which Albertans call the Foothills. Look to the East, and the land is so flat that on a clear day you can see all the way to the back of your own head.
OK, maybe that's exaggerating a tad. But I think if you squint, you can probably see Manitoba in the horizon.
We had two cabins available, but decided to only use one, as they were rather huge. The four old married folks stayed upstairs, and the four under-thirties stayed downstairs. Mark has the patience of a saint, and plays the role of the Cool Young Uncle/Older Brother extremely well. This included listening to Daniel's extensive D&D/game narrations, and playing various games that involved chasing children through bushes. God bless him.
Day 8
On the last day, we stopped at a lake for lunch, and did some canoeing. Also high on my God Bless Them list was one of our guides, Matty, a seventeen-year-old who completely enthralled Justin with his utter coolness and patience and sense of humour. And, you know, the whole cowboy thing. In fact, I don't think Justin remembers his name; he refused to call him anything but Cowboy.
Cowboy joined the kids swimming in the freezing, freezing cold lake. Oh my God.
Cowboy even let Justin put on his hat. Bliss!
Kind of cool home schooling tie-in: one of the days we were in Vancouver, we ended up visiting part of the city where there used to be a community of Japanese-Canadian fishermen, before they were interned and sent inland after Pearl Harbor. The boys had heard of the Japanese internment, both because I wrote a Civil Liberties paper that included it (mynuet's suggestion, got a great mark, thank you mynuet!) and because we'd watched The Greatest Canadian episode on David Suzuki (who was interned when he was six).
So one day we're eating around the campfire and Cowboy gets third helpings of rice. The other guide teases him about it and he says, "Hey, I'm part-Asian; I like rice."
"Really?" asks Trinh, who's Vietnamese.
"Yeah, my grandpa was Japanese. His family lived in BC till they were sent out here during WWII."
Small world.
Said goodbye to Dennis and Vancouver. Justin, who loves babies and younger kids, had taken an interest in Dennis, and had come to tell us, very excited, every time he'd managed to have some kind of interaction with him.
"He looked at me!"
"He smiled at me!"
"He said Thank you!"
I don't have any pictures of Dennis, so I'll have to ask Trinh, because the two I took were unrecognizably blurred.
Took a plane to Lethbridge, which is a small town in Alberta that
batita expressed great fondness towards. ::cough::Day 6: Kayaking
Sadly, kayaks and cameras are not generally likely to be best of be friends. So we didn't bring ours. But we had a great time, kayaking about 5 hours in a river near Lethbridge.
I don't know if any of us had kayaked before. I know I hadn't. And we'd expected all the kids to be with adults, but there were only two double kayaks, so Emma went with my father, Justin went with me, and Daniel said, "Yeah, I can handle a kayak on my own."
Not My Kid.
He didn't do so well at first - couldn't get the hang of the thing, kept getting involuntarily turned around, snagged on rocks, and lagged behind the rest. Same as me, only I had Justin in my kayak so I also had to keep my cool and not pitch the hissy fit I was aching to pitch.
Happens so, so often in parenting: you not only have a hell of a time coping with something nigh-uncopable, but you also have to do so With A Smile, because you've got a little person who will be totally crushed if their parent loses it, and it's not just All About You.
Daniel had no such obligation and so he pitched a few hissies, and nobody could really blame him. One of the guides finally connected their kayaks together for a while, and gave him a bit of time to collect himself.
And then the kid gathered himself up, decided to try again, and bloody well learned to kayak.
As my dad said, "Daniel is my hero today, you know?"
Again: Not My Kid.
Emma was also not doing terribly well for a while there - it was cold, it was tough paddling, they kept getting snagged. The weather wasn't the only thing clouding over; her expression was more than a little stormy for a while there. And yet she also gathered herself up and was able to enjoy herself, despite the cold. Neat kid.
At the barbecue at the end of the kayaking, she said once again, "I still don't quite believe you're my sister."
"Well, you may not believe it, but I'm starting to. I would've been just like you during the kayak thing, except I wouldn't have been able to cheer up like you did."
A thoughtful look greeted this revelation ;)
No kayaks, but the Wuthering Heights weather was about this cheery:
Day 7: Horsies!
Our first serious day on horseback. Here's a shot of our cowboy guide, Trinh on Tess, Justin on Skeeter, Daniel on Peanuts, and Emma on Ginger.
The ranch is in a beautiful location. Look to the West, and you see mountains that would make any Ontario skiier swoon, but which Albertans call the Foothills. Look to the East, and the land is so flat that on a clear day you can see all the way to the back of your own head.
OK, maybe that's exaggerating a tad. But I think if you squint, you can probably see Manitoba in the horizon.
We had two cabins available, but decided to only use one, as they were rather huge. The four old married folks stayed upstairs, and the four under-thirties stayed downstairs. Mark has the patience of a saint, and plays the role of the Cool Young Uncle/Older Brother extremely well. This included listening to Daniel's extensive D&D/game narrations, and playing various games that involved chasing children through bushes. God bless him.
Day 8
On the last day, we stopped at a lake for lunch, and did some canoeing. Also high on my God Bless Them list was one of our guides, Matty, a seventeen-year-old who completely enthralled Justin with his utter coolness and patience and sense of humour. And, you know, the whole cowboy thing. In fact, I don't think Justin remembers his name; he refused to call him anything but Cowboy.
Cowboy joined the kids swimming in the freezing, freezing cold lake. Oh my God.
Cowboy even let Justin put on his hat. Bliss!
Kind of cool home schooling tie-in: one of the days we were in Vancouver, we ended up visiting part of the city where there used to be a community of Japanese-Canadian fishermen, before they were interned and sent inland after Pearl Harbor. The boys had heard of the Japanese internment, both because I wrote a Civil Liberties paper that included it (
mynuet's suggestion, got a great mark, thank you mynuet!) and because we'd watched The Greatest Canadian episode on David Suzuki (who was interned when he was six).So one day we're eating around the campfire and Cowboy gets third helpings of rice. The other guide teases him about it and he says, "Hey, I'm part-Asian; I like rice."
"Really?" asks Trinh, who's Vietnamese.
"Yeah, my grandpa was Japanese. His family lived in BC till they were sent out here during WWII."
Small world.
