Sunday, August 27, 2006
Vacation with the niblet
We took our summer vacation last week and just got home yesterday. Vacation "styles" have definitely changed since having a kid. It's fun...but not so, er, spontaneous. So it's good that I'm hooked up with Sheryl, because I'm not exactly what you would call Planning Guy.
Sheryl's family owns land up near Bancroft, surrounding part of Vance Lake up there. She and her family used to vacation up there all the time when she was a kid. During the times when they were visiting but NOT camping at the land (ie winter), they would stay at a place called Birch Cliff lodge. So that's where we decided to go for holiday. We hornswaggled Amanda and Derrick and their 6mo daughter Emily to come with us for a few days as well. They came and stayed in a horse trailer (it's much more luxurious than it sounds...) and we spent the days feeding kids, napping kids, going on the occasional dip or hike and playing some games.
Fionna has gotten to an age now where she (temporarily, we hope) HATES canoes (too unstable? too weird?) but LOVES (permanently, we hope) beaches, sandboxes and playground equipment. I spent a long time sliding down slides with her, provoking squeals of delight and requests for more. I have discovered that playground slides: (1) work best in adventure pants and worst in pyjama pants (2) are covered in dew in the morning but your daughter doesn't care because it's not her butt touching the slide and (3) work REALLY well in the afternoon, after all the other kids have greased it up with the sunscreen from the backs of their thighs.
It initially felt a bit funny to be packing up all our stuff and travelling a few hundred kms to pay money to live in a cabin near a lake when...we already live in a big 'ole mansion right ON a lake. But there really is something to be said for having no phone, no chance of being interrupted by others or caught up in daily chores and having a bit of a change in routine. It was nice, in the end. Sheryl and I are also planning a possible vacation further into Oct/Nov, perhaps just the two of us, for a quick Last-Fling-Getaway prior to Niblet 2.0 being released. Maybe we'll go see the 3 Cirque du Soleil shows in Vegas...
Sheryl's family owns land up near Bancroft, surrounding part of Vance Lake up there. She and her family used to vacation up there all the time when she was a kid. During the times when they were visiting but NOT camping at the land (ie winter), they would stay at a place called Birch Cliff lodge. So that's where we decided to go for holiday. We hornswaggled Amanda and Derrick and their 6mo daughter Emily to come with us for a few days as well. They came and stayed in a horse trailer (it's much more luxurious than it sounds...) and we spent the days feeding kids, napping kids, going on the occasional dip or hike and playing some games.
Fionna has gotten to an age now where she (temporarily, we hope) HATES canoes (too unstable? too weird?) but LOVES (permanently, we hope) beaches, sandboxes and playground equipment. I spent a long time sliding down slides with her, provoking squeals of delight and requests for more. I have discovered that playground slides: (1) work best in adventure pants and worst in pyjama pants (2) are covered in dew in the morning but your daughter doesn't care because it's not her butt touching the slide and (3) work REALLY well in the afternoon, after all the other kids have greased it up with the sunscreen from the backs of their thighs.
It initially felt a bit funny to be packing up all our stuff and travelling a few hundred kms to pay money to live in a cabin near a lake when...we already live in a big 'ole mansion right ON a lake. But there really is something to be said for having no phone, no chance of being interrupted by others or caught up in daily chores and having a bit of a change in routine. It was nice, in the end. Sheryl and I are also planning a possible vacation further into Oct/Nov, perhaps just the two of us, for a quick Last-Fling-Getaway prior to Niblet 2.0 being released. Maybe we'll go see the 3 Cirque du Soleil shows in Vegas...
// posted by Unknown @ 7:28 PM 
