Mountain Biking Lake Tour

 This school year has been like no other. Masks, cohorts, daily health checks and quarantine. To celebrate making it to the end of the school year we booked a getaway to Squamish/Whistler.

Super Dad has introduced us to mountain biking and all starting to embrace it. Nothing crazy steep or dangerous but it is fun to get the adrenaline pumping and work on the stamina to do the technical climbs up the mountain. The trails at Lost Lake in Whistler are our family favourite.

The temperature was unseasonably hot for the end of June and it was around 32 degrees on Friday and 41 degrees on Saturday. The heat wasn't as bad in the shade of the forest but it was still pretty hot - we toured a bunch of lakes and jumped in. 

Jumping in at Alice Lake

Cooling off at Lost Lake

Dock-hopping at Alta  Lake

Splashing at the hotel pool

We justified the delicious food with all the kms we biked

After an intense year, this trip was a much needed reset button.

Until the next adventure...

The Corona Diaries - One Year Later.

Last time I wrote about the pandemic, it was the end of April 2020 and it was all just happening.

People still called it “the Corona Virus” and not Covid-19 and we were told that if we all stayed in our houses in two weeks we could “flatten the curve”

Now it’s the end of June 2021 and I got the second dose two weeks ago. It feels like the light at the end of the tunnel.

We just went to church for the first time since March 2020. People I hadn’t seen in over a year ask, “How have you been?” I feel a bit at a loss on how to summarize the last 15 months.

We made some wonderful memories during the pandemic and sometimes the limit restrictions actually made things more enjoyable like having the skating rink almost to ourselves...

I got up at 6:00 am to book our preferred timeslots for skiing and we had a lot of crazy blizzard days up at Mt. Seymour

We finally had time to work on that crazy 3D puzzle the kids got as a present

We got outside whenever we could and hiked up to beautiful viewpoints like this 

We READ so many books and so glad the library stayed open during the pandemic. It was fun to get books in a brown paper bag for pick up like dinner take out. 

We turned our house into a bakery and baked lots of treats

We learned to embrace Zoom and made Gingerbread houses online with Auntie Rainbee

We stayed local over Christmas and discovered Sasquatch is a great family mountain

We scouted bikes for the kids and Daddy introduced them to mountain biking

We made the most of our time inside and made forts and tents and slept in the living room

But there was grief too. My grandma passed away very quickly in Oct 2020. We were supposed to go see her in the summer, she was as healthy as a 98 year old could be but Ontario was in lock down and we didn’t go. And now we won't have the opportunity to be together again. That was really hard. 

She was cremated in Ontario and flown here where we had a ceremony with just our family. 

Lots of tears and sadness that day. The last phone call I had with her was the morning before she died and my heart was aching listening to work so hard to take in each breath and tell me in Chinese that she was suffering. I'm so heart broken that we won't get to see her anymore, we won't be able to make  dumplings together or have dim sum together and take a 4 generations picture like we did in 2017 but I'm glad she is now in Heaven. One day, I'll see her again and maybe I'll learn how to play mah-jong in Heaven.

I interviewed the kids back in April 2020 and I video-taped them again on video at the end of May 2020. You can watch the interview here I think Nallie sums it up the best when I asked her what she learned from the year and half during the pandemic, this wise 9-year-old simply said, "Trust in God.

Amen to that.

Camping is not cancelled!

After a year of letting go of so many social gatherings and events. The provincial health regulations changed just in time for us to go camping with friends and it was so life-giving. The forecast predicted rain for the whole weekend but just bought more tarps and pop up shelters and hoped for the best. The weekend did not disappoint!

We managed to get campsites all beside each other. The kids rode their bicycles all around their campsite with laser guns and glow sticks. Apparently, stirring things up with another group of kids which they referred to as The Sorry Gang.

We signed up for a timeslot and the kids enjoyed the pool while the parents supervised pool side.

We walked around Cultus Lake and some of the boys braved the cold and jumped off the dock.

We savored all the campy things like sitting around the fire, making s'mores and hotdogs and enjoying conversation with friends not on a computer screen.

The most exciting part was probably the troop of brazen raccoons that invaded our campsite. The first night one managed to open up one of our friend's Rubbermaid containers and run off with a bag of marshmallows. We left our griddle out and they left their sizable footprints all over it. 

The second night they walked right into the campsite where we all were and ran off with our cinnamon buns. One of the other dads even set up a trap with Oreo as bait but they managed to grab the Oreos without the box falling on top of them. There were at least three or four of them the second night and they fighting. It was 11:00 pm and we had all gone inside our tent but we weren't asleep yet. The sound of the raccoons fighting right beside our tent sounded so ferocious if I hadn't known they were raccoons, I would have thought it was a wolverine and it would going shred our tent. The kids (and I) screamed and huddled altogether as we listened to the wild commotion. The raccoons weren't even phased when one of the dads starting throwing firewood at the raccoon trying to scare it away. 

So besides the excitement of the raccoon fighting... the rest of the weekend was so restful and rejuvenating.

Good weather. Good friends. Good times. It really is the simple things that fill me up.