Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Connor's Grade 6 Camp
Connor has had a wonderful teacher for Grade 6 this year and she arranged a ton of field trips for his class, including an overnight trip to a camp west of Edmonton. I encouraged Jess to go along as a chaperone and one of the side benefits of having him there is that he took lots of great photos. Here are a few of Connor enjoying the different activities at the camp:
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Hudson's Karate Tournament
Hudson started his first year of karate in September. Connor did several years of karate and Hudson couldn't wait until it was his turn to start. But when he actually started taking lessons, he was quickly disappointed that there was much less fighting than he imagined and much more work. Classes consist mostly of drills and exercises like push ups and sit ups. However, at my insistence, he has persisted and he is always obedient to his senseis and at this tournament, he really saw the results of all his hard work. He's much stronger and faster than he was in September and he did very well in the competition. He participated in the "Capture the Flag" game and the board breaking competition and came home with gold medals in both. He was so pleased with his medals because, as he told me, they weren't the kind you get at soccer where everybody gets a medal, these were "real" gold medals, only given to one person. Jess had cut out pieces of cardboard for Hudson to practice breaking and Hudson had been practicing breaking them all week so it was really great to see him be rewarded for his extra practice.
Cabo San Lucas 2016
We were very lucky to be able to go as a family to warm and sunny Cabo San Lucas, Mexico in February. My mom went with us and we spent the week at a very posh hotel, the Hacienda del Mar, thanks to her timeshare points that she had been saving up.
This is the view from the balcony of our hotel room:
It had a number of pools, as well as a beautiful beach. The beach had a dangerous riptide and a rough surf though so we didn't swim there.
Early on in our trip, we booked a whale watching trip. We chose a small boat and booked the boat to ourselves. Two nice young Mexican men gave us a six or seven hour tour of the ocean around Cabo San Lucas. It was supposed to be four hours but they forgot the snorkeling gear which was supposed to be included in the tour and didn't realize they'd forgotten it until we were a couple of hours out. So, they dropped us off at a beach and left us there for about an hour while they went and got the gear and then they added some extra time onto the tour to make up for the mistake.
Shae, Connor and Hudson all tried snorkeling for the first time on this boat tour. Hudson went out for about ten minutes, saw a few fish and then he'd had enough. He really didn't like the taste of the salt water and so he wanted to get back in the boat pretty quickly. Connor also was not a big fan of the experience. He found the waves pretty overwhelming and the deep water more disconcerting than he expected and wanted to be done pretty quickly. Ironically, Shae - who was much more reluctant to try snorkeling than Connor was, because of a fear of deep water - ended up enjoying it much more than she thought she would, and stayed out for at least half an hour. She even learned how to dive down to the coral, something I've never tried.
In this picture, you can see one of the humpback whales we saw and you can see one of the other whalewatching boats. We were really glad we decided to book a boat to ourselves instead of booking ourselves onto one of those tours. Because of the size of our family, it didn't cost any more to do it the way we did but it was much better.
A little later on we found a mother with a baby:
And we found one more whale, here it is spouting and then a shot of its fluke though it's a bit hard to see because of the glare of the sun on the water:
Then we pulled into the heavy traffic around the landmark that Cabo is known for: Land's End. It's the big arch shaped rock formation that at is the very southern tip of the Baja peninsula. The whole area was packed with boats, sea-doos, and adding to the noise was a delightfully oblivious colony of sea lions.
Land's End is right beside the most popular beach in Cabo so it's always busy. This is what you see if you turn around and look towards land:
The next day, we decided to just relax at the resort.
Beside one of the pools, there were different activities going on and the kids were interested in the activity where you could make your own tie dyed tshirt.
You can barely see at the end of the row of chairs, but that's one of the resort workers restoring the beach to order after having tourists make a mess during the day. So much goes on behind the scenes at a resort and it's sort of sad that more people don't realize it or appreciate it.
The next day we drove to a beach, Playa Santa Maria, that was only a few minutes away from our hotel but that had a protected cove and so it was safe for swimming and it also had coral reefs and so we knew it had some decent snorkeling. The water was gorgeous but the sand was not quite ideal. It was more like small rocks than sand so it was kind of torturous to walk on.
One of the first things the kids did when we got their was soak their tie dyed tshirts in the ocean because the salt water was supposed to help set the dye.
The next day we chilled at the resort again.
The next day, we decided to drive the other side of the Baja peninsula to the city of La Paz so that Jess could go swimming with whale sharks. We had decided at the beginning of our trip that I would be the one to drive our rental since driving a rental in Mexico is ridiculously expensive (they make insurance much more expensive here than at home and it's mandatory) and so it didn't make sense to have more than one driver and Jess was already very stressed about the idea of driving in Mexico in general so we agreed I would drive to help him relax a little. I found driving in Mexico quite challenging. It was different than I expected. The thing that surprised me the most was the "Retorno"s. It's the system they use for exiting and entering their highways. Instead of onramps and offramps, they use these gaps and retornos that are bridges over the highways that I still don't totally understand. The gaps are really scary (to me) to use. And Mexican traffic circles are also really scary to me. And speed limits!!!!! Nobody follows them. Nobody. They are approximate suggestions that maybe one in fifty cars follows. Everybody else seems to do about 50-60 km/h faster than the speed limit. I was so worried about getting a ticket but I also didn't want to stick out in the traffic flow, it was really hard to figure out what speed to drive. And then there were the stop signs. I did stop at all the stop signs. But one time when I was driving in rush hour traffic in La Paz, I was passing through a large intersection with a stop sign with lots of traffic behind me and I got honked at for daring to stop for the stop sign - everyone else around me was barely slowing for it. They were driving about 60 km/h and barely slowed down for the stop sign. When we got home, the first morning I was driving the kids to school, we had a snow storm and the roads were quite icy. I realized as I was driving how relaxed I felt and how easy everything was. And I laughed to myself at how I never would have thought I'd ever find driving through a snowstorm on icy roads easy but after driving in a foreign country where everything is different from what you know, icy roads were a breeze. It made me feel a lot more compassion for immigrants who have to learn how to drive in a new country and just have to get used to it.
Anyway, a 2 hour drive through the desert was pretty intimidating but I was feeling up for the adventure. We had our trusty GPS with us and we were looking forward to seeing a new part of Mexico. Jess was getting better at being a navigator by this point (more navigating, less backseat driving/freaking out and screaming in panic as I swerved through traffic) and he was really excited to swim with whale sharks. Shae and Connor sort of wanted to swim with whale sharks too but they decided after snorkeling that they were too scared. So they were going to go on the boat with him to see the sharks but not actually go in the water with him.
We saw LOTS of cacti along the way.
See that speed limit sign? NOBODY followed it. Just a friendly suggestion, apparently.
Once we got to La Paz, we parked by the marina and found a man who offered to take Jess, Shae and Connor out to find some whale sharks. The rest of us hung out at the marina, ate lunch and collected sea shells on the beach.
Look closely, you can see the dark shadow behind Jess and the fin poking up out of the water behind him. That's the whale shark. It was a pretty small one. Apparently some can get as big as a school bus.
After the whale shark tour was done, we still had an hour before it was time to leave La Paz so we drove to the Serpentario, a small petting zoo/rescue centre. We had a great time holding the birds and petting the bunnies.
This was supposed to be our last day in Mexico. We packed up our bags when we got back that night and headed to the airport the next morning. However we had a bit of an adventure at the airport the next day. My mom went home on a different flight and she got home just fine. However our flight was a different story. Our flight was supposed to leave at 11:00 am. Just as we were sitting down in our seats and doing up our seat belts, a passenger a few rows behind us had a heart attack. There were two doctors on the flight and they rushed back to help. While they were doing chest compressions, the rest of the passengers were eventually asked to leave the plane. and the EMS people arrived and took over. We waited in the waiting area for an hour or two and were eventually told that because they had to take all the luggage off the plane and because the flight attendants were too traumatized to fly that day and there wasn't time to fly a whole new crew down from Calgary that day, our flight was cancelled and we wouldn't be flying home until the next day. So they'd be putting us up in a hotel that night and flying us home at 3 pm the next day. So we had to go get our luggage and then find the shuttle to the airport hotel. That was all fine but the biggest confusion for us was that we thought we had to go through customs again. Mexican customs is a nightmare. We stood in line for about an hour and were maybe a quarter of the way through the line before I asked an official about it and when he found out what flight we were on he told us we didn't have to go through customs (hallelujah!) and ushered us right past that cursed line to the luggage carousels. Here's a picture I took on my phone of us standing in that line. You can't even see the front of it.
Anyway, we finally made it to the hotel. It was nothing fancy but we got all the free food we wanted and they gave us three rooms so we each got a queen bed to ourselves and the first decent wi-fi of our trip and we made friends with our fellow stranded passengers, made an exciting mad dash through the Calgary airport to successfully make a ridiculously tight connection during which we felt like we were contestants on the Amazing Race and had some great stories to tell. And the kids still made it back to school on Monday morning. Much to their delight. And Shae overheard some passengers saying that the heart attack passenger survived. So it all had a happy ending.
This is the view from the balcony of our hotel room:
It had a number of pools, as well as a beautiful beach. The beach had a dangerous riptide and a rough surf though so we didn't swim there.
Early on in our trip, we booked a whale watching trip. We chose a small boat and booked the boat to ourselves. Two nice young Mexican men gave us a six or seven hour tour of the ocean around Cabo San Lucas. It was supposed to be four hours but they forgot the snorkeling gear which was supposed to be included in the tour and didn't realize they'd forgotten it until we were a couple of hours out. So, they dropped us off at a beach and left us there for about an hour while they went and got the gear and then they added some extra time onto the tour to make up for the mistake.
Shae, Connor and Hudson all tried snorkeling for the first time on this boat tour. Hudson went out for about ten minutes, saw a few fish and then he'd had enough. He really didn't like the taste of the salt water and so he wanted to get back in the boat pretty quickly. Connor also was not a big fan of the experience. He found the waves pretty overwhelming and the deep water more disconcerting than he expected and wanted to be done pretty quickly. Ironically, Shae - who was much more reluctant to try snorkeling than Connor was, because of a fear of deep water - ended up enjoying it much more than she thought she would, and stayed out for at least half an hour. She even learned how to dive down to the coral, something I've never tried.
Here she is holding a live starfish that one of our guides brought to her.
In this picture, you can see one of the humpback whales we saw and you can see one of the other whalewatching boats. We were really glad we decided to book a boat to ourselves instead of booking ourselves onto one of those tours. Because of the size of our family, it didn't cost any more to do it the way we did but it was much better.
A little later on we found a mother with a baby:
And we found one more whale, here it is spouting and then a shot of its fluke though it's a bit hard to see because of the glare of the sun on the water:
Then we pulled into the heavy traffic around the landmark that Cabo is known for: Land's End. It's the big arch shaped rock formation that at is the very southern tip of the Baja peninsula. The whole area was packed with boats, sea-doos, and adding to the noise was a delightfully oblivious colony of sea lions.
Land's End is right beside the most popular beach in Cabo so it's always busy. This is what you see if you turn around and look towards land:
The next day, we decided to just relax at the resort.
Beside one of the pools, there were different activities going on and the kids were interested in the activity where you could make your own tie dyed tshirt.
You can barely see at the end of the row of chairs, but that's one of the resort workers restoring the beach to order after having tourists make a mess during the day. So much goes on behind the scenes at a resort and it's sort of sad that more people don't realize it or appreciate it.
The next day we drove to a beach, Playa Santa Maria, that was only a few minutes away from our hotel but that had a protected cove and so it was safe for swimming and it also had coral reefs and so we knew it had some decent snorkeling. The water was gorgeous but the sand was not quite ideal. It was more like small rocks than sand so it was kind of torturous to walk on.
One of the first things the kids did when we got their was soak their tie dyed tshirts in the ocean because the salt water was supposed to help set the dye.
Jess spent most of the day at this beach snorkeling. I went out with him briefly a couple of times. The water was calm and quite a bit shallower here so I tried to convince Shae and Connor to try snorkeling here. Shae tried it and hated it. She learned she much prefers to keep her distance from the fish. Connor tried it (after a LOT of coaxing) and had a much better time.
The next day we chilled at the resort again.
The next day, we decided to drive the other side of the Baja peninsula to the city of La Paz so that Jess could go swimming with whale sharks. We had decided at the beginning of our trip that I would be the one to drive our rental since driving a rental in Mexico is ridiculously expensive (they make insurance much more expensive here than at home and it's mandatory) and so it didn't make sense to have more than one driver and Jess was already very stressed about the idea of driving in Mexico in general so we agreed I would drive to help him relax a little. I found driving in Mexico quite challenging. It was different than I expected. The thing that surprised me the most was the "Retorno"s. It's the system they use for exiting and entering their highways. Instead of onramps and offramps, they use these gaps and retornos that are bridges over the highways that I still don't totally understand. The gaps are really scary (to me) to use. And Mexican traffic circles are also really scary to me. And speed limits!!!!! Nobody follows them. Nobody. They are approximate suggestions that maybe one in fifty cars follows. Everybody else seems to do about 50-60 km/h faster than the speed limit. I was so worried about getting a ticket but I also didn't want to stick out in the traffic flow, it was really hard to figure out what speed to drive. And then there were the stop signs. I did stop at all the stop signs. But one time when I was driving in rush hour traffic in La Paz, I was passing through a large intersection with a stop sign with lots of traffic behind me and I got honked at for daring to stop for the stop sign - everyone else around me was barely slowing for it. They were driving about 60 km/h and barely slowed down for the stop sign. When we got home, the first morning I was driving the kids to school, we had a snow storm and the roads were quite icy. I realized as I was driving how relaxed I felt and how easy everything was. And I laughed to myself at how I never would have thought I'd ever find driving through a snowstorm on icy roads easy but after driving in a foreign country where everything is different from what you know, icy roads were a breeze. It made me feel a lot more compassion for immigrants who have to learn how to drive in a new country and just have to get used to it.
Anyway, a 2 hour drive through the desert was pretty intimidating but I was feeling up for the adventure. We had our trusty GPS with us and we were looking forward to seeing a new part of Mexico. Jess was getting better at being a navigator by this point (more navigating, less backseat driving/freaking out and screaming in panic as I swerved through traffic) and he was really excited to swim with whale sharks. Shae and Connor sort of wanted to swim with whale sharks too but they decided after snorkeling that they were too scared. So they were going to go on the boat with him to see the sharks but not actually go in the water with him.
We saw LOTS of cacti along the way.
See that speed limit sign? NOBODY followed it. Just a friendly suggestion, apparently.
This lighthouse waterslide is for sale!
Once we got to La Paz, we parked by the marina and found a man who offered to take Jess, Shae and Connor out to find some whale sharks. The rest of us hung out at the marina, ate lunch and collected sea shells on the beach.
Look closely, you can see the dark shadow behind Jess and the fin poking up out of the water behind him. That's the whale shark. It was a pretty small one. Apparently some can get as big as a school bus.
After the whale shark tour was done, we still had an hour before it was time to leave La Paz so we drove to the Serpentario, a small petting zoo/rescue centre. We had a great time holding the birds and petting the bunnies.
This was supposed to be our last day in Mexico. We packed up our bags when we got back that night and headed to the airport the next morning. However we had a bit of an adventure at the airport the next day. My mom went home on a different flight and she got home just fine. However our flight was a different story. Our flight was supposed to leave at 11:00 am. Just as we were sitting down in our seats and doing up our seat belts, a passenger a few rows behind us had a heart attack. There were two doctors on the flight and they rushed back to help. While they were doing chest compressions, the rest of the passengers were eventually asked to leave the plane. and the EMS people arrived and took over. We waited in the waiting area for an hour or two and were eventually told that because they had to take all the luggage off the plane and because the flight attendants were too traumatized to fly that day and there wasn't time to fly a whole new crew down from Calgary that day, our flight was cancelled and we wouldn't be flying home until the next day. So they'd be putting us up in a hotel that night and flying us home at 3 pm the next day. So we had to go get our luggage and then find the shuttle to the airport hotel. That was all fine but the biggest confusion for us was that we thought we had to go through customs again. Mexican customs is a nightmare. We stood in line for about an hour and were maybe a quarter of the way through the line before I asked an official about it and when he found out what flight we were on he told us we didn't have to go through customs (hallelujah!) and ushered us right past that cursed line to the luggage carousels. Here's a picture I took on my phone of us standing in that line. You can't even see the front of it.
Anyway, we finally made it to the hotel. It was nothing fancy but we got all the free food we wanted and they gave us three rooms so we each got a queen bed to ourselves and the first decent wi-fi of our trip and we made friends with our fellow stranded passengers, made an exciting mad dash through the Calgary airport to successfully make a ridiculously tight connection during which we felt like we were contestants on the Amazing Race and had some great stories to tell. And the kids still made it back to school on Monday morning. Much to their delight. And Shae overheard some passengers saying that the heart attack passenger survived. So it all had a happy ending.
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