Family and Friends - Day 8

Today was the end of the adventure part of our vacation and the start of the relaxing part of our vacation. For the rest of our holidays, we are staying with Sandra's relatives and we aren't planning on doing anything more strenuous than going for a boat ride.

We had planned on taking Xander to a small amusement park in Edmonton that allowed five year olds to go on a go kart with an adult, but unfortunately, it started raining before we left, which made it impossible to go out on the track. Luckily, we had kept the entire thing a secret from him, because we were never sure if we would have time, or if the weather would cooperate, so until he is old enough to read this blog, he won't know what he missed.

We tried to get lost leaving Edmonton, since the road signs to the major highways could be improved. We were on Whitemud, which indicated that that it was highway 14 headed towards highway 16. However, at one point the freeway ends and you are expected to know that you have to take highway 216 to get to highway 16 without a single sign indicating which way should be taken to highway 16. We also had to fight our GPS, which was adamant that the way to Loon Lake was through a bunch of tiny northern highways rather than through Lloydminster.

Anyway, we quickly outran the rain and stopped at a giant Ukranian egg in Vegreville for lunch. It was a bit windy for the boys, but I was able to sit outside and feed Jonathan while everyone else ate their lunch in the car. After that, we drove all the way to Loon Lake, where we will be spending the next few days with Rick and Colette. After arriving and unpacking, I realized how nice it is to visit here, as our kids play extremely well together. All four of the oldest kids disappeared and we hardly saw them or heard from them until it was time for supper.

After supper we took all the kids to the beach. They immediately ran into the water and Evan was quickly soaked, but they had a great time. They built a big lake on the beach, filled with buckets of water from the lake. While all this was happening, Jonathan was sitting in the sand, eating large amounts of it. It seems like all my kids end up eating sand at some point. After a short time at the beach, we drug the extremely wet kids back to the house and put them to bed. Hopefully the weather is good enough tomorrow that we can do something outside - the forecast is for the rain we left in Edmonton to arrive here sometime tomorrow, though.