MUNGO EATS Latin America

We have been hanging out with the McLean grandparents for the last 3 days.  The weather has not been the greatest and most Okanagan natives are complaining that it has been a very cold spring.  It has rained for the past 2 days, on and off, and it has been cool by Kelowna standards, only about 15 or 16 degrees.  Yesterday we took advantage of a break in the weather to visit a winery.  Today we decided to head west in search of a more pleasant climate. 

We headed to Salmon Arm (actually, more precisely, Canoe) to visit Kevin’s Aunt Geneva.  Aunt Geneva is one of my favourite “acquired by marriage” relatives, although the list is pretty long.  She lives on a small acreage in Canoe, and I just love this little plot of land.  It is a nice mix of woods and field, and I think it is fabulous. 

Kevin has many fond memories of his time spent on the acreage as a kid, and he pointed out all the highlights to the kids today.  This was the first time, in their memory, that they visited the acreage.  I know Sara was there as a newborn, I don’t know if Sean has ever visited. 

After being fed a great lunch, the kids decided to explore the hayfield behind the house.  A fellow usually harvests the hay for Aunt Geneva, but he seems to have abandoned his duties, so the hay is grown slightly out of control.  The kids thought it was great that you could walk into the hay and “disappear” any time you wished.  Here is Sean…now you see him…

Now you don’t!

And the same disappearing act from Sara…here…

gone!

It’s amazing how a simple thing can bring amusement!!

Hopefully the weather will be a little better in the next few days and then we can do a bit more outdoors.  We are only in Kelowna for a few more days.  My Mom is planning on chauffeuring us to Calgary on the 21st (yeah, no more flights!!!).  Hopefully we can make the most of our limited time left here.

Well, Kelowna has been what we expected it to be, nice, calm, relaxing.  Sometimes we can do this, but for these McLeans, there is such a thing as too relaxing.  Today we decided it was time to get off our duffs and do a little exploring.  We decided to check out the Kettle Valley Railway. 

The Kettle Valley Railway trail is a converted old rail bed, which now is used by the public as a walking and cycling trail.  The trails are located 3000 feet above Kelowna.  This trail system was declared a National Historic Site in January 2003, and as fate would have it, this was a lucky break.  In the summer of 2003, Kelowna was the victim of crazy forest fires.  Many of the railway’s original wood trestle bridges were destroyed in these fires.  Eventually, the trestles were rebuilt and now the trail is better than ever.  Kevin and I had cycled on these trails a long time ago, way before the fires, but we had not been back since the rebuild.  The trail is great, and it is sometimes hard to tell which of the trestles are new and which are original. 

Kelowna is way down below.  You can see the burned out trees as well.  Tree regrowth is not really obvious yet, but the forest floor is nice and green with smaller plants, and I still think it looks quite pretty.

We brought a bike up with us, and  Sara and Sean took turns riding.  I only got pictures of Sean, because Sara just basically took off when it was her turn. 

Sean had fun riding over bridges and through tunnels.  You could hear him just ahead of us on the trail, and every time he said,"Oh cool”, we knew there was another bridge or tunnel around the next corner.

Very nice walk.  It was warm, and Mungo let us know at the end of the walk, that he was a little warm and tired.  Nothing like laying under a vehicle to cool you off.

Don’t worry though folks, he bounced back just fine.  In fact, in just a few hours, he was ready to play “pig in the middle” with the kids as they played badminton.

Watch the birdie…

Chase it down…

Make some crazy leap…

And come away with the prize.  By the way, between the laughing and the panic you experience as an 80 lb beast careens toward you, badminton becomes a great deal more challenging!!!

We are in Kelowna. The trip from Toronto to Kelowna was great. We flew with Westjet and they were so helpful. Mungo was allowed to go on as checked in baggage and that made everything so much nicer. The flight was pretty good, very little turbulence and obviously a 4 1/2 hour trip was a lot easier on all of us than a 15 hour trip.

We were met at the airport by both sets of grandparents. There was a lot of hugging and kissing and of course a few tears (my mother and I are both big babies). At least this time, they were tears of happiness. We will be staying at my parents place for a week, followed by a a week at grandparents McLeans’ house. We all had lunch at my Mom’s together first though. When my mom is happy, she does what all good Italian ladies do…she cooks. Needless to say, lunch was a feast.

Mungo is pretty happy here. He just can’t believe that his world now consists of more than one room at a time, and quite often we find him just wandering around the house, seeing what is behind the next door. Also, he can run around the backyard almost unsupervised, the yard isn’t quite closed in, but it is better than a short chain. Since my Mom is almost always cooking, or getting ready to cook, or just doing something with food, Mungo has decided that she is the best person to keep an eye on. He follows her everywhere, hoping to scrounge up the leftovers. Actually, she is a sap as well, and I have seen her toss him bits already.

So, all is good in our lives. I don’t think I will be posting very much for the next couple of weeks. I will let you kow if anything exciting happens, but mostly we will be catching up with our families. We will slowly be assimilating back into our lives. You would think it would be easy to fall back into our normal routines, but yesterday I did two things that I did as we travelled, and would never do at home. The first thing was that I was washing some dishes, and I had the rinse water running at a trickle. My Mom came by and turned the water on a bit more, shooting me a confused look. We lived the whole year being very careful of our water consumption, because the water tank in our van would only hold about 50 litres. Even though it is best to be careful about water consumption, I could probably use more than a trickle to rinse.

The second thing I did was even more embarrassing. We did not have hot water in the van, and whenever we wanted hot water, we had to warm a pot of it up on the stove. I had to give Mungo a mini bath yesterday, since he was stinky after the flight (flying scares the pee out of him). I started to fill a pot with water to put it on the stove, before everyone in the house reminded me that we had hot running water at our fingertips. Too easy!!

Sorry that I haven’t posted in the past few days.  Not much has happened, and I just didn’t want to bore you all.  We made it back to Toronto okay, and this morning Kevin dropped off the “unit”. 

We are sure that we will never buy a camper like that.  So, what we rented folks, was a very large truck with a camper on it.  The camper had a “pop out” or “slide”, which is a section of one wall that gets popped out when you are stopped for the night.  The pop out had the kids two beds in it.  The thing we did not realize was that when you are driving and pop out is not “out”, there are large bars projecting into the interior of the camper.  So if you try to use the camper without sliding out the pop out, you constantly have to leap over the bars.  Not fun.  During our 2 weeks with the camper, we had 5 things go wrong.  There is a exterior shower, that is housed in a small cupboard outside the trailer.  We used the shower to rinse Mungo off, the first day we had it and the second day, the whole locking mechanism for the cupboard just fell off.  One minute it was there, the next, the cupboard is just hanging open, with no lock in sight. 

Our second mishap involved the sink and toilet dumping.  We kind of outlawed using the toilet in the camper, unless there was an emergency and NEVER for number 2.  It  is kind of lucky that we did.  In case you are not familiar with RVs, the way you “dump” is the following.  First you take the cap off the drain pipe and attach a flexible pipe that leads to the drain.  Then you open the valves and the black and grey water flows through the pipe, down to the drain.  Unfortunately, the valves in our camper were left open.  So when Kevin opened the cap, all the water just started flowing out.  Not a big deal when it was just soapy dish water, but man, it would have been a HUGE disaster if there was a bunch of toilet “stuff” as well. 

Mishap number three involved the spare tire.  We assume it was there when we got the vehicle.  We were told that it was, although, we didn’t actually check.  If it was there at the beginning of the trip, it certainly was not by the time we hit day 5 or 6.  We were on a road that had lots of dips in it, and the truck bounced up and down over the dips.  We think this is where we lost the tire.  If it had been secured properly, it would have been fine.  Again, not our fault. 

We had problems with the propane tanks, because when we had to exchange tanks, something was unaligned properly.  Finally, the camper chains were not tight enough, and while we were driving, the camper slid back 2 or 3 inches. 

So five issues in 2 weeks.  That is without once driving on washboard roads, and being bathed in dust and blown by the “broom of God”.  For all our problems with our little van, we NEVER had these kinds of issues with our cute little van. 

In any case, our unit is returned, and tomorrow morning, we fly to Kelowna to reunite with the grandparents.  We are all looking forward to living in a house for the first time since Christmas.  It is not our house, but it will be a pleasant change. 

Tonight we are on the shore of the mighty St. Lawrence River.  What a huge waterway this is.  We are near Quebec City, in Beaumont, and the  far shore of the river  looks  so far away.  I would hazard to guess that it is about 3-5 kms wide at this point.  Further east it is so wide that the far shore is not even visible!!! 

It was rainy again today, but every once in a while, the rain would quit and the sun would come out and it would be quite nice.  During one of these breaks in the weather, we took Mungo down a HUGE set of stairs, that went from the campground to the shore of the St. Lawrence, 236 steps in all!  No one was around, so Mungo got to goof around off leash.

The height of the St. Lawrence ebbs and flows with the tide, so the shores have all sorts of things to discover.  Mostly it is garbage, plastic bottles and such, but we did find a volleyball and Mungo had a blast chasing that around.  It was just big enough that he couldn’t quite get his jaws around it (or it would have been popped in an instant).  Instead, he would chase it and push it around with his nose, and guard his treasure against us. 

Sometimes, you over run it, and you have to make such a quick stop that your back end flies up!

Eventually though, you go in for the kill bite!!

There were some beautiful flowers down on the shore.  There were forget-me nots,

chives,

and irises.

Also, we were surprised to find a waterfall emptying into the river. 

What a great place to explore!  It was almost worth climbing back up the 236 steps!!!  Almost.