E-Kelowna

When I booked the trip to Kelowna in early March, I figured that  by June in the Okanagon we would be pretty much guaranteed warm weather, if not sunshine.  After all, it's just north of Canada's only desert and home to major summer time wildfires.

The whole package sounded pretty appealing.  A baseball tournament with friends from my fire department, 3 days off school for the kids and a hotel with a pool right beside one of the coolest beaches (Gyro) around.   As an unexpected benefit, my friend and school principal Brady, had his school hosting a night of family fun and games.

Here is Lucas on the climbing wall......he was more adventurous than I would have guessed.



Finny climbed in bare feet and got right to the top.

Molly preferred the slingshot-the-animals game.....and did really well.

The trip was great but the weather was horrible.  We even got rained out of our last day of baseball.....and despite mercying every other team by 10+ runs, we ended up coming in fourth after they decided the seeds by coin toss.   It was the first time I had played in a real baseball game in about 30 years, and it showed.  I wasn't horrible but I wasn't exactly comfortable either.  Luckily I had enough talent around me and always managed to make contact with the ball so that I didn't have to buy any rounds of beer.

On our final day the sun came and we played in the pool for a couple of hours before heading to the beach.  In fact, the weather got so nice that the kids even did the zipline into lake Okanagon.  In the evening we met Brady, Lisa, Jaelie and Rylan at East Side Mario's for dinner before heading back to Vancouver.

Although we didn't arrived back in town around midnight, I still managed to make it out to The Manchester to see my friend Mark Wallbridge on a rare visit from England.

The next day I took the kids all the way around False Creek on their bikes and back across the Burrard street bridge for a picnic with the Warringtons at Kits Beach.