How to Spend a Weekend...The Good and the Bad

This past weekend Karyn and I went to Salmon Arm with Kevan and Leah to have a relaxing time away from Calgary, take a look at a few places we might want to live and, in general, have a good time.

We left Calgary on Friday evening at about 5pm and drove all the way to Salmon Arm. Along the way Kevan and I had the need to take a few pictures outside of Golden along the Trans-Canada Highway of the moon hanging just above the mountains. It looked very cool in reality, but the pictures were a little disappointing. Moon shots are just TOUGH to take! We did, however, snap a few shots of cars screaming down the highway and got some neat head/tail light trails!We arrived in Salmon Arm sometime around 10:30pm local and headed to Dave and Carene's place. They were gracious enough to open their door to us to crash there even though they weren't home. On Saturday we went to look at a few places Karyn had found online, one in town and one in Silver Creek, about 15 minutes outside of town. The place in Salmon Arm was a dive...a BIG DIVE. They were asking way too much for this terrible house that was only good for tearing down. In its defence, it was situated on a pretty large property for in town and that's why it was so expensive. The place in Silver Creek was pretty nice. We weren't huge fans of the floor plan of the house but the lot was great. Situated on about 1/3 of an acre on a quiet street with a shop, a garden shed, and a garage. They were asking a little more than we can afford and we realized that the house was going to need some work, something we're not prepared to invest in at this point in our lives.

The next part of the day was the most painful I've experienced in a while. We had to pay for a camp site. Yeah, that's right, I forked out $22 to pitch a tent 10 feet from a complete stranger next to the highway. It hurt...a lot! We were pretty hot so we decided to go swimming but the beach there was, to put it mildly, NASTY. The mud was slimy, the water was dirty, and we didn't want to swim in it. We ended up renting a paddle boat for an hour, paddling out, and swimming off it. In the evening we went back to Dave & Carene's place to shower (and get the nastiness of the lake off us) and out for dinner to PJ's Restaurant which was great. If you're ever passing through Salmon Arm, eat there because they have a great salad bar and smorgasboard of food for a really good price.

Sunday we woke up early, drove to Tim Hortons, and were planning on going to the 9:30 church service at the Salmon Arm Free Methodist church. When we got there we realized that the Lakeside Community church (who shares the same building) had their service at 9:30 and the FM church service was at 11:15 so we went back to PJ's for breakfast (apparently that's what they're known for in Salmon Arm). When we were done Kevan and I played frisbee/football for about 30 minutes in the park and Karyn and Leah read while we were waiting for the church service to begin. We walked in at about 11:10 and we were the youngest people there by at least 25 years! Oh man, what an old-people service. That said, the people were really friendly and there was a lot of genuine love in the congregation for one another which was something I haven't seen in a church in a long time.

After the church service was over we went and looked at a few town homes that we're thinking of buying. They were ok and certainly more in our price range than some of the houses in Salmon Arm. After, we went to Dave & Carene's (again) and we all headed up to Wallensteen Lake, well above Salmon Arm townsite in the hills, where we were planning on spending the night. The road up there was somewhat questionable and I still feel bad for Kevan & Leah's Honda! Most of you don't know this, but Hondas truely are SUVs disguised as a sub-compact car. The Honda made it up to the lake where we spent the afternoon relaxing. We were disappointed at the quality of the camping site so we decided that we were going to head back to town a few hours later (and potentially have to pay for camping again!). Kevan and I played frisbee and football for about an hour and then got bored while Dave was out catching dinner. Looking for new things to do, Kevan and I got the trusty hatchet out of the trunk again and taught ourselves how to properly throw it into a tree (look closely in the picture to find the flying hatchet...Kevan had some issues on this one getting it to stick in the tree!). We had a fire, partially cooked Dave's fish that he caught, and decided to head back to town.
(Just because Mollie is so cute, I had to post a couple pictures of her...this, however was when she wasn't filthy after rolling through a cow pie!)

That evening we were offered a place to spend the night at Dave & Carene's again (bless their hearts!) and enjoyed the evening munching on fish and watching The Legend of Zorro. Do yourselves a favour, don't watch that movie!

Monday was our first anniversary and we managed to spend it driving in the car back to Calgary! I can't think of a better way to spend an anniversary, can you?!? As is tradition in the Lucas family, Karyn got dressed up in her wedding dress and we took a few pictures. It was lovely of Duane to oblige to my seemingly odd family tradition...what a great guy!