Long Weekend Redux

After a long, and intense, Canada Day weekend I figured a real update was long overdue. Having Friday off Viv and I departed in the early afternoon for the cottage on Crystal Lake to beat the common urban exodus. We arrived in under 3 hours including a stop-over mid-way for lunch at McDonalds in Beaverton as well as buying a few items at a bustling supermarket in Fenelon Falls for a planned BBQ dinner later that night. Once we arrived and settled ourselves in to our room, and a brief tour of my mom's raising garden, we went for a quick errand to Kinmount for the appropriate long-weekend amenities: alcohol and fireworks. We made a quick heritage detour nigh on our return drive to the township of Galway to show my fiancée some of the withering old gravestones for one ancestral line of my family: the nineteenth-century immigrant ancestors of my mother's father's family originally from (get this) Limerick, Ireland.

Upon our return to an empty cottage and a dour sky with pouty, grey clouds we fired up the old blackened, weary barbeque and cooked some prime cuts of beef and baked a few pre-packaged sour cream and chives baked potatoes for dinner. We had to contend with a few finicky fits of pelting rain and the barbque's propane running out, however, overall our meal cooked and tasted delicious - of course officiated by my fiancée - and my mom returned from her dad's and joined us in time for the end of the meal. My grandfather later joined us, too, and he chatted tersely with Viv and I before we set off to see the Superman movie at the famous Highland Cinemas in Kinmount. Our first day.

Then I awakened early next morning, Saturday, rising, instinctively, with the beckoning of the morning sun for a breakfast of coffee and eggs. Though I couldn't beseech my sleeping beauty, my fiancée to get out of bed this early, I sat outside dashing peanuts across the front lawn of our hilltop property for the chipmunks and birds in the morning hours. An hour or two later my uncle Doug arrived - travelling from Windsor - as well as my mom's cousin's wife Jessica and her two sons, who own the cottage that was formerly my grandfather's home which he was reared in, for a morning visit. About this time my fiancée woke up, and I heated up the left-overs of the previous night's meal for her breakfast. She joined us, and we sat around listening to my well-travelled uncle, who is a trucker, tell marvelous stories of he and his wife's winning fortunes at Ontario casinos and race-horse tracks. Unfortunately, we had to leave shortly after noon to return to the city - a short escape - to attend my godbrother's BBQ in Etobicoke.

We rested for a short while after returning to Brampton, and then left to visit my godbrother and his family, of whom I hadn't seen for two years since the christening of his adorable daughter Mckenna. We sat around chatting with my godbrother, his family, and guests - respectively, his best friend and fiancée and next-door neighbour and his wife - before retreating inside from the rude pell of rain and eating a pleasant sit-down meal. Plans were set for everyone to head over to Ribs Fest nearby, and fireworks later, but we left and returned to my fiancée's place for a meal and heading back to launch our own fireworks in the park.

Sunday, I woke up early and told to get ready for another busy day - this time a church peer was hosting a day-long get-together in Drumbo, outside of Brantford and Cambridge, on their farm. After a delicious, hearty meal a bunch of us crammed into two cars, one of them mine, loaded up two canoes and drove over to the town of Ayr. What followed was a fun-filled, adventurous, bug-ridden three-hour canoe ride - with my fiancée, her brother and two other 'city-slicker' friends - down the local river. I managed, in the duration, to lose my new, expensive rim-less glasses in the river after swatting them off my face into the water, trying to smack the ravenous swarms of deer flies eating us alive three-quarters along the way. As a result, next day we had to buy a new pair, as well as sunglasses before I could return to my daily, weekly routine of work.