Bluebird's Nest

Today I’ve asked the tweenager to be my guest blogger. I wanted to capture her thoughts on the cross Canada trip we made by interviewing her. Please feel free to comment and ask any questions to her. She will be sure to reply.

1. What was the part of the trip that you liked the most?

   My favorite place we stayed was in with John and Sylvie, I enjoyed that the most because it was soooooo pretty! The most peaceful thing I ever did was fly-fishing on the river there. Also the beds where really comfortable and camping doesn’t provide luxurious mattresses .

2. What was the worst part of the trip you disliked the most?

   My least favorite part of the trip across Canada was Morse (middle of no where) Saskatchewan. I disliked this the most because (and I may sound like a downer) it was the most hot I’ve ever felt, and the most mosquitoes I’ve ever seen, all thought the thunder, lightning and down pour cooled things down a little and put the mosquitoes partially at bay. That was the first night in the tent and so far not so good .

3. Which city was your favourite and why?

   My favorite city was Riviere du Loup in Quebec, the day we traveled there over all was the best day of driving because we stopped in Quebec city for an hour and a half, but when we got to Riviere du loup we stayed in our very first B and B (Bed and Breakfast) it had the most amazing view of the Riviere Saint Lawrence, (Saint Lawrence river), welcome cocktails/orange juice and topped off with an amazing sunset and my own room. Plus an awesome breakfast in the morning!

4. What was the most memorable experience and why?

   Wow that’s a hard one and I know I hate it when people do this to me and it sound really stupid like can’t you just pick one but the whole experience was soooo memorable for me, the boring days in the car on the west coast the fun touristy things in the east coast, the good food, laughs, wild life, almost squishing wild life (porcupine… ouch!), rain storms, swims, hot days and so many things that I have missed but will one day come back to me.

5. What was your favourite meal and why?

   Lobster at Johns house, yummy, yummy lobster, it tastes like heaven, I don’t know what else to say.

6. If you could have done something differently, what would that be and why?

   If I had the option I would have spent more time in hotels, camping is fun for a while but it’s difficult and boring when you do it too much plus we had quite a bit of rain (mostly nights when we where in a tent… what luck).

7. If you could have not done something, what would that have been and why?

   Wow my only regret is taking a little lick of mama’s ice cream before she got it and not telling her, I’m guilt ridden to think that I didn’t ask, I hope you will forgive me Mama …

8. What do you think you learned about yourself?

   I learned that I can almost sing baby beluga in my sleep, baby beluga is the wee babes fav song and some times the only thing that will make her shut up in the car, personally I think it’s almost as annoying as the crying.

9. What do you think you learned about the others you traveled with?

   Hmmm… I don’t really have any dirt to dish on the “hubby” (as you know him) and Mama.
   I learned that the wee babe is prone to mood swings, that Mama is a princess now and “the hubby” can’t not lead us around cities.

10. If you had to describe the trip in 3 words, what would those be?

    I love Canada

Finally I have to mention that I hope I didn’t disappoint you with my answers, I’m not all that heartfelt or serious, I’m only the tweenager after all.

There you have it! Straight from the Tweenagers mouth! You can follow along on her blog as well at Live, Love, Laugh by JJ.

Yay! We’re back on Canadian soil!!! Pretty happy to land back in my home country for some reason. I’m not even a big fan of Timmy Ho’s but we even made a stop there today. Oh and we almost stopped at Canadian Tire to pick up a new camp stove (our old one was leaking propane and it actually made a big fire show when my hubby tried to light it this morning to have our morning coffee. It’s awfully Canadian of us.

So happy to be back to regular cream in my coffee, not the powdered crap. What’s up with that anyway? I don’t understand why they don’t have normal cream in their coffee. Gross. Hopefully no American’s are offended when they read that.

So after a chilly night of camping in Higgins Lake we packed up and had a big long day of driving ahead of us. The nice thing is that the long days of driving are behind us and now we get to see the sights. We really wanted to make it to the East Coast to see all it had to offer and I think there’s a bunch of things to see over here

We passed the blue blue waters of Lake Huron today. I’m really suprised by how blue the water has been in all the Great Lakes we have passed. I’ve seen some nasty documentaries about how polluted some of the lakes are and it’s just not evident in the colour of lake that’s for sure.

We stopped for food at a Subway today while we were still in the States. I don’t know if they have these kinds of sandwiches in Canada but the have a turkey, bacon, avocado sandwich there and it’s oh so yummy. Had to try it.

We headed over the bridge back into Canada and stopped on the other side to give the wee babe a bit of a grass break. Like I said, it was a big long drive today. One mistake we made was thinking it would be easy to find camping on a Saturday no problem.

I was a little at my wits end as everything seemed to be full and we were so looking forward to staying put in one place for 3 days before seeing Allison in Ottawa (that’s right, we’re almost there girlfriend!!) so we were a little dissapointed that we couldn’t find anything. Finally we found something with a pool, grass, a little store, bathrooms, free showers but it’s unfortunately beside the highway. Sigh…

I think we’ll still park ourselves here for a few days just to be able to stop and relax rather than packing up again. The mozzies aren’t too bad.

Tomorrow we head out for a short day to Niagara Falls, probably a swim in the pool, and some relaxing by the fire but first we’ll start the day with a big breakfast.

I’m back in WIFI/network range again. Gawd it feels good !! No photos today. No time.

EXPENSES:

Camping: $32
Wee babe disposition: Pretty good. A couple of times it was hard to get her to go to sleep and at the end she had had enough. Long day of driving. Lot’s of Baby Beluga.
Weather: 28 degrees average, sunny with puffy clouds.
Stress level: Pretty even keel except for when the wee babe decided that she’d had enough and we weren’t ready to stop.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had the first first aid treatment of the trip. I went to get something out of the cutlery box and a knife slide between my nail and the skin. No blood but an awkwardly cut finger nail.

We woke up in the morning to the sounds of the rushing river beside our tent (hell of a lot better than a train) and the birds singing away. There was steam rising off the river. So pretty. We had some breakfast, packed up and then the hubby and the tweenager took off to go tubing, I put the wee babe to sleep and then I relaxed in front of the river with a magazine for an hour and a half.

After they came back we packed up the last of our stuff and headed off to find lunch. We stopped  in at a greasy diner called “Memories Café”. All I can say was the food was not terrible but it stank of grease.

It was a pretty uneventful day on the road with a late start. And yet another blow out diaper. What is with this kid??!?! Are we buying the wrong kinds of diapers or does she just poop weird?

Our landscape has changed to pine trees now. Not nearly as beautiful as the prairies IMHO.

We’re camping again tonight in Wisconsin. This place is not nearly as nice or neat as the other two but the camp site is huge and still grassy.

Mosquito meter on a scale from 1-10, a solid 7. I would give last night a 3 at dusk  and the rest of the time a 0. Our first camping experience was a solid 10. I don’t think it could have gotten any worse.

I’m loving the cooler we bought. Plug in style and nice and big. It’s really perfect. The tent is also amazing. Great size, quick set up and did really well in the thunder and lightening wind and pounding rain in Sasketchewan.

Tomorrow we’re onto Michigan with and early start as we are in need of a laundry facility and a shower. Eeek!

EXPENSES:

Camping: $24
Wee babe disposition: Still stellar
Weather: 27 degrees average
deer, chipmunks
Stress level: really low for most of the day but topped out at 100% during some weird driving my hubby did. I’m not going to write about it as it was too painful.

Yesterday was the fourth of July so last night the tweenager and my hubby set off some fireworks in honour of us being in the States. I had a wonderful bath. Glorious.

My hubby didn’t sleep very well, for me not too bad. The wee babe woke up 2 times in the night.

Today we did a detour due to all the flooding in North Dakota. It was a little nerve racking for me but it went really well. Took us a little extra time but it all ended up well in the end.

The scenery was stunning as usual. I love the rolling hills and blue blue open skies. We came across a field of white windmills. It was really beautiful against the wide open spaces.

We played a game of name that tune. We each took turns humming a song. It had me in stitches as people sound pretty funny when they are trying to hum a song and my hubby was the most hilarious.

Have you ever noticed that in almost every small town there is a “Main Street”? Instead of looking around for grocery stores now, we just look around for Main Street and you can find almost everything you need there.

We stopped for a break in Drake next to a really quaint little park to have some fruit, a cookie and a granola bar. The wee babe took a stretch. We got some cute photos.

We also stopped in Rugby to grab some food for lunch and dinner and then went to a campground where there was a picnic table for us to make sandwiches. There was this really strange field of school buses there too. Like lots of them. Kinda strange.

We also stopped in Devil’s Lake for some coffee treats.

There were two campgrounds that the hubby had sussed out but they were an hour apart. We went to the first one and it was really nice. But a lot of mosquitoes and the tweenager is suffering big time. So we persevered on to the next place here in Red Lake Falls and I’m so glad we did. Again, there’s no one even close to us, we pretty much have the place to ourselves. We’re right on the river, it’s grass with a fire pit. NO MOSQUITOES!!!

We picked up our first sticker today at the campground in Wisconsin!! We missed a sticker in North Dakota again (mom and Aunty, help us out if you happen to go this way).

We made steak and corn and then started a fire. The wee babe went to sleep and now we’re reflecting on our day. I think we’re finally settling into road tripping and enjoying the great outdoors.  It’s nice to hear about how the tweenager is final gets what my hubby and I were trying to tell her before we left on how wonderful it will be to hit the open road just trying to figure out where we will be staying and what we will be doing every day.

I’m lacking some serious internet connection here being in the States it’s too expensive to tether so we’ve been having to stop in at tourist info centre’s to check out maps and such.

EXPENSES:

Camping: $23
Wee babe disposition: Great! Loves being outside.
Weather: 27 degrees average
Items lost: blanket
Stress level: Vunderbar! Minus 50% when finding the camp ground (I was so peaceful and happy). 2-3% overall

Take two. So I wrote my entire blog post last night before bed and when I went to publish it there wasn’t a connection to the internet so I lost the whole thing. Sigh…

Lesson learned: write in word first and copy/paste when ready to upload.

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A big shout out to Kelly and her family in Richmond as well as the Campbell Family in Coldstream.

Now where did I leave off…?

Right, we left Kelly’s house after a warm goodbye and headed East. (I guess I don’t need to specify that we headed East, that’s a bit of a given no?)

We hit the road and the wee babe pretty much fell asleep pronto.  The hubby took the first leg and he sussed out the best use of the Cruise Control. If you can believe it, he even did research before we left on how best to use it for the least gas consumption. And he calls me a control freak…

We stopped on the Coke somewhere and it was freezing! Ok, maybe not 0 degrees, but 7 degrees was frosty. After a quick diaper change and toilet stop we continued on. I guess that was too much for the baby, because about 10 minutes later she started to howel. Luckily, we were about 20 minutes away from Merritt so she screamed until we got there. My nerves were fried by the time we arrived at lunch.

After some yummy pizza and Greek salad we soldiered on and the wee babe fell asleep again and slept until Vernon.

A quick pit stop to get some Okanagan cherries and we arrived at our destination: Campbell family home. We were greeted by my cousin (or is it my second cousin. Maybe he’s my first cousin once removed or is it second cousin twice removed… anyway he’s family.) and his family. A short while later his mom and dad showed up and then his wife and her mom.

The we had dinner. Man, were we spoiled. 3 different kinds of salad, beef skewers, chicken, corn, and deviled eggs – did I miss anything? It was so amazing.

We went for a walk to the park and the local fire station (my cousin is a volunteer fire fighter) where I took some photos and we were infested with mosquitoes (mozzies die!!). We returned back to the homestead and had a wonderful trifle. So delicious. Thanks Reen!

We watched the photos of a trip that my cousins son, took about a month ago, took of Egypt. I was inspired to say the least about our trip in October. He’s a wonderful photographer!

The wee babe was still not asleep by 10 (argh!!) so it was time for lights out for the family. I was spent and pleasantly fed.

That night the wee babe only woke once in her tent (YES!) but sadly the mattress that I was sleeping on deflated in the night so it was rather sucky for me. My wonderful husband offered up his bed (thanks baby) but there was no point in both of us suffering the next day.

Rise and shine at 6:30 with the sun streaming into the bedroom from the East J. After a shower we were faced again with coffee and a full spread breakfast of pancakes, bacon, strawberries and scrambled eggs. This cousin of mine better watch out or he’s going to have a house full of relatives if the rest of them get wind of how amazing a cook he is.

Packed up we set sail again after another warm goodbye. Thanks guys y’all ROCK!!

The Swiss mister is really loving Vernon and the lakes. What is it called a 4 season city with activities for all seasons. I think I would like to rent a cottage on one of the lakes next summer for a week or so with some friends. That would be grand.

We’re back on the road again (a little behind schedule but albeit good) heading to Calgary. We think we’ll stop in Lake Louis for a photo and somewhere for lunch.

The weather is beautiful. Sunny, a few wispy clouds and the traffic’s not bad (yet).

EXPENSES:

Gas: $20 @ 1.25/litre
Food: $33 lunch and $12 cherries
Wee babe disposition: pretty stellar
Weather: 7 on the Coke, 22 in Vernon
Things that have already broken: air mattress
Stress level: a solid 100% when the wee babe was howling. Back down to a normal 5% for the rest of the time save for mozzie attacks when it would creep back up to 75%.