Much Needed Family Vacation

After working 50 hours a week for the past month and a half straight we finally got ten days off to go on vacation…WOOOT.  It was awesome. The trip was really well planned out to the day, not to mention times we were leaving, how long we were staying in one place etc….except that the whole thing hinged on whether our good friend ian was able to take the time off to come with us on the last 2/3rds of our trip. So we went with a plan that involved being flexible if our original plan did not work out….but that’s okay that’s sort of how we are anyways so we went with it.

We started on Friday morning leaving at 7am, 5 minutes driving on the highway we realize our hood is not properly latched and find out a spring broke….sooooo then we went to canadian tire at 7:30 who did not have the part, to an auto place that did not open until 8am who had the piece and so jessie put it in but it wasn’t going in right so we then did a quick jant down the street to our mechanic who fixed us up and we were off again by 8:30am….

I am not going to go into as much detail about the trip but I will go day by day and give you a pretty good overview so hang tight for a bit of reading.

Friday- Lef

t Sylvan Lake 8:30am, stopped in Kamloops at about 5 to visit our good friend Roya for dinner for an hour and a half and then finished the rest of our journey to Vancouver arriving at the hastings-heins/al-parvars (I have yet to see it writen down to actually know how to spell it!) at about 10:30pm….not bad.

Saturday- The Dad’s (Shane, Chris and Jessie took the kids (Olee, Aria, Diego and Isabella) to a festival in the morning then we went for a beautiful hike with Shane (brother), Juliet (my sister-in-law), Olee and Will (their sons) at Lynn Canyon. It was an easy hike for them but considering I am from Alberta where it is very flat it was a bit more of a workout, lets say I hurt the next two days, but I loved every bit of it. Aria really enjoyed the sites and hanging with Olee. We had a nap and then that night we went to Sushi….mmmmm….and had yummylishious food at King Sushi and very reasonably priced! And of course once the youngins were down it was chitchatting time for us moms and dads.

Sunday- We went to the beach with not only Shane and Olee but my sister-in-law Erika and her two kids Isabella and Diego. That was a blast. Aria got to play in the sand, building stuff, getting wet, and throwing rocks into the ocean. Then lunch, nap time and then a great family dinner where afterwards we got to hang out some more and exchange experiences as moms, computer geeks, dads, work and catching up on life.

Monday- Left the fam’s house about 9:30 to catch the ferry to Vancouver Island to Nanimo then drive up to Courtenay to visit LOTS of people….lets see Jan/Ed, Crynn and her family, Uncle George and his kids, then finally to Pam, Guy and Ian’s place where we had dinner, and stayed the night.

Tuesday- We left for Victoria and arrived around 3:00, hung out at our hotel then went for dinner at Whitespot with our good friend Tamara and her boyfriend Bryn. Afterwards we got together with Cathy, bought some books at a bookstore, visited Ian’s sister Kim and her boyfriend Dan and then back to the hotel for bed.

Wednesday – Left the hotel again around 9:30, got to the ferry heading for Port Angeles in Washington and was the second to last car to make it on…PHEW. Aria loved the boat! We then drove from Port Angeles to a little town where we caught another ferry to Edson just north of Seattle and drove down. It was interesting converting my mind from KM to Miles and they definitely have very interesting infrastructure for their highways, HOLY COW! First of course we hit the main event for Ian, THE LEGO STORE, which actually is a really cool store and I found some really nice maternity close on for cheap cheap so I got some. Then we found a nice, reasonable hotel RIGHT next to the Space Needle and Seattle Centre so we  took it and put up our feet.

Thursday- Woke up for a nice buffet breakfast and started our day off with the Seattle Pacific Aquarium which Aria had such a great time! We all did!  Then We went on a harbor cruise and got a bit of history about Puget sound, seattle and seattle area, not to mention saw one of few sea lions. Then that night we had to experience a Fry’s electronics and man was it huge! Its like the costco of electronic stores.

Friday – Started our day off fairly early again with a visit to the science museum which came with an imax show (Dinasours alive), science fiction museum (freakin’ cool!!!!) and art project museum (really neat historical stuff), and then that night we did the space needle which was really neat. Aria like the elevator and looking through the telescopes looking out on the city.

Saturday- We stopped at the Woodland Park Zoo where Aria has now become obsessed with monkeys, elephants and giraffes. It wasn’t probably the greatest time of year to go but we enjoyed it all the same. After almost three hours of that we drove 5 hours to Roya’s house in Kamloops again. But this time we made a little more time by hanging out and spending the night. But we had to leave relatively early because our plan was to make it home Sunday night.

Sunday- driving, driving and more driving but good news we made it home and had a great nights rest.

I forgot to mention a few interesting things throughtout our trip like the GPS that we had (cheap one for computer) would tell us to go the wrong way down one ways and sometimes would tel lus too late to turn for places…etc…it was certainly an “adventure” even with it.

Oh and I got sick…phewy…but Enjoyed the trip as a whole!