Aylmer Express "MoHo" Extravaganza 2006

cognoscente \kon-yuh-SHEN-tee; kog-nuh-; -SEN-\, noun;plural cognoscenti \-tee\:
A person with special knowledge of a subject; a connoisseur.

What do you do for your birthday when you are on vacation? Having your birthday at this time of year means that you are often on vacation for your birthday so I guess Chantal is used to this dilemma. We started off by sleeping in late. Then we took it easy, had breakfast and checked our email on the campsite’s free, if somewhat slow, internet access. Then Chantal decided that she wanted to wash the MoHo. Given that the weather report for tomorrow was showers I didn’t think it was the best time to do it, however I am malleable and besides, what the birthday girl wants, the birthday girl gets. The deciding factor came down to the fact that they had the facilities available for doing so right at the campground. So we unhooked the MoHo and drove over to the garage where we found the usual power sprayer with the wash/rinse/wax options. We spent far more time than normal trying to get all the dirt off of this baby. Wash, spray on the “Black streak and bug remover”, scrub, wash again, spray on the “Black streak and bug remover” some more, scrub some more, wash once more, finally start to rinse, run out of loonies to feed the washer, get more loonies, spray on the wax, squeegee the windows. There, now that was easy, eh?

Finally we head out for some biking along the Saskatchewan River (sound familiar?). Yes, this is the same river that runs through Saskatoon. Fortunately Edmonton too has some beautiful bike paths by the water and I wish that we could have seen more of them. We didn’t really know where to start so we just drove to a place where we knew the path was located and started there. The first kilometer or so toward town was all downhill … which seemed nice at the time. The return trip was a slightly different story but Morgan and I were proud to be able to make the entire trip uphill on our bikes, albeit with a rest stop or two along the way.
Then it was off to Colette’s place for dinner as she had invited us over for Chantal’s birthday. We got another chance to see great-aunt Alice as well as meet Colette’s husband, Neil. He and Colette have been retired for 5 or 6 years and now spend their winters in Arizona and their summers in Edmonton, when they are not traveling the world! They have been to all sorts of places and had just returned from a European tour that included Russia. We had a fun time there and André-Paul was quite happy to see that they had an electric piano. It was a lovely evening and it was a little sad to think that this visit may well be our last visit with great-aunt Alice … but hopefully not!

# posted by Jeff, Chantal and the kids @ 11:38 PM