Tannis Orr

Tannis is playing hockey this year on a local women's team. She beat me to it! Her friend Ally joined up too, and it sounds like the first practice was great.

Peat Bog

This was from a couple of weeks ago already, but I wanted to keep these links. I did some more trail exploration around Penticton before our trip and had a great ride at the Peat Bog, which is really in the boonies, but a lot of fun. It also connects to Code 4 and appeared to continue right down into town...but I had to ditch out to climb back up to the car. Oh, for a shuttle on perfect days like that. Both trails (and Knuckleduster) were sort of old-school (1999) aggressive riding, with low plank bridges, little kickers and log rides, most of it on sweet singletrack without too many really steep sections. Great for confidence if the new big-hit trails seem impossible.

Winnipeg Trip

It was a bit disturbing when Tannis figured out that Ivy has been to Manitoba six times in her three years of existence. Twice a year? No wonder we never have the time or money to go anywhere else. Anyway, we spent about a week on the prairies and unfortunately (fortunately for loyal readers?) I don't have the energy to recount all of the mundane details. I took no notes and we mostly took terrible photos or none at all of the nicest places and experiences. So it goes...

The weather in Manitoba was fantastic -- sunny, warm and not too windy -- so we spent a surprising amount of time outside enjoying parks like La Barriere and Crescent Park in the city. We got to lounge on the grass at Larry and Pearl's a few times, pretending that it was August instead of October.

Greg and Sophie took me out to Gimli for the day a couple of days after we flew in. Greg and I explored Winnipeg Beach and drank beer and solved the world's problems in the sunshine at Sophie's Mom's cute little cottage nearby. Absolutely idyllic out there -- I had no idea how nice it was. Greg and I hooked up a couple of other times, which was good for my soul.

We also spent a glorious afternoon at Cedarwood for the Hildebrandt Hoot -- somehow managed to go canoeing, play football, and have conversations with a dozen or so wonderful relatives who I don't get to see often. This is the extended family including all of my grandma's siblings and their kids/grandkids/great-grandkids, so there were almost a hundred people there, all with family-tree coded nametags to help us figure out who was who.

Being over the Thanksgiving holiday, the trip was pretty family focused overall. Larry and Pearl were amazing hosts (as usual) and they had all of Tannis's Friesen relatives over for a feast on the weekend. Chad and Crystal and their girls were around a few times, to the great joy of our girls (we were happy too, of course). I took Ivy and Ella out to Niverville for the Hiebert clan's shindig the next day -- it was chaos with little kids everywhere, but it was good to catch up with the gang again. The next morning my Grandma made waffles and borscht for brunch, and my parents and Aunt Carol joined us as well.

My social circle has certainly shrunk in Manitoba -- I suppose time and distance have had their predictable effects on old friendships. Plett and Heather treated us to an excellent supper on Tuesday night, after Plett and I hung out around town for the afternoon. Felt bizarre to be back in Rosenort. I was out in Sanford a couple of times to hang out with Milt and Carla, and even got to ride Milt's CRF450 on his track...unfortunately managed to bang up my foot after getting sideways off a jump, but stomping my boot down was better than crashing. Still limping today.

Aside from all that, I failed miserably in trying to catch up on my homework and didn't manage to fit in any exercising at all. We did manage to fight off colds the whole time, but we all seem to be in recovery mode today, napping away most of the afternoon and staying pretty close to home. It's pretty nice to have a few days to unwind before diving back into work.