Some how we have lived in Washington for 10 years but have never gone up to visit or neighbors to the north: Canada. Some friends of ours have a cabin up in Whistler and invited us to stay the weekend. We took this opportunity to let Holly try out snowboarding and signed her up for lessons.

The lessons lasted for an entire day and she was completely exhausted at the end but she had a lot of fun and seemed to pick it up pretty well!

Of course being Seattle, it rained but unusually hard. They were drenched.

They won 2 – 1!  They played on a full size field, as you can see it is the school’s football field and being soccer they run a whole lot more than you do when playing football.  I was getting tired just watching!

Update: Sep 22, 2010

They played Interlake tonight and won 5 – 0.  Holly scored goal #2 in the game.

Carol and I went early to do some shopping at the outlet mall next door. Afterward we headed over to Bob’s Burgers and Brew. Larry met us there but unfortunately Paula was under the weather and couldn’t make it.

The concert was a real blast! There were a real collection of characters at the concert. This one woman in front of Larry enjoyed his company and conversation but I don’t think Larry enjoyed her pretty much toothless mouth! HAHA.

Anyway its was awesome. Lynrd Skynrd had several more big songs than I remember. After we headed into the casino and hung out to have a few waters before heading home. We watched people playing craps but the real entertainment was the crowd Larry was talking to over a the bar. We hung out with everyone for a couple of hours before heading out.

The campus is very nice and has more than enough amenities to be comfortable. The cafeteria is especially good, serving sustainable, organic food.

It was pretty hot while we were there with Monday hitting over 100 degrees.

It was a ton of fun. After a half day of classroom work, Carol and I went out on a J-24 sailboat with one other group of two plus a captain / instructor. We each took turns doing all the basics sailing upwind, across the wind and of course downwind.  You can’t ever sail directly into the wind but you can come pretty dang close and that’s the most exciting because it feels like your moving really fast and the boat can “heel” or lean over because of the force of the wind against the main sail.  At the same time, you want to avoid sailing directly downwind as well because the boom that the main sail on swings back and forth and a small change in wind direction can make it swing wildly across to the other side and hit someone.

One of the most exciting things happened on the second day. We were going to be on the boat all day practicing anything we wanted.  Carol was taking us out of the marina.  I thought it would be fun to do a man overboard maneuver.  It’s somewhat complicated to do, especially since you don’t have a motor on the boat. You also have to be fairly precise because you have to bring the boat up extremely close to the person in the water so that you can haul them in.  They won’t be able to climb in themselves.

Well I threw the big bumper we had been using for the maneuver overboard. Carol didn’t know ahead of time that I was going to do that so it caught her off guard. In perfect form though, she performed the maneuver perfectly and we retrieved the bumper.

The real surprise was when just after pulling up the bumper her hat flew off and we had to do it again!  The trickier thing is that the hat is super hard to spot in the water and especially hard to track while she is performing the maneuver.  She still pulled it off in one try so all hail Capt’n Carol!

The repairs were covered by insurance, like a good neighbor. While they were being repaired and refinished, we could not stay in the house so the insurance company agreed to pay for a hotel plus meals for the duration of the repair. It’s not easy to find a hotel that can accommodate five plus a cat so Carol asked what restrictions there were in where we can stay. They said we can stay wherever we want as long as it costs the same.

Well, I don’t know about you but if you can stay wherever you want, why not stay at a beach house? We chose to head to Seabrook. We told the kids they could each bring a friend so Kelly brought Joanna (Jobo) and Holly brought Amara. Of course Linda come with us too!  We brought a ton of food with us so we could just BBQ each night. We had to take two cars because of all the food and bags.

I couldn’t afford to take that many vacation days so I brought my work with me and worked out on the porch.  It was great! We could see the beach from the porch so that’s why I chose it for my office.