Wisconsin 2015

WI was good, although we missed having LBJ and my parents there (my dad was sick - temporarily - and could not make the long drive).

The "barn" (as my sister calls it) is great, although it would have been a bit cosy if all of us were there  (which is understandable - they did not build it to host all of us at the same time).

We spent a lot of  time in the water, as the weather was very good - only 1 day of rain, and even then it cleared up in the afternoon.  The local library is great, so we had plenty of reading material.  And we had plenty of toys / activities for the girls (and a good book to read for me - Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid).

I got to go on several kayak trips, including a guided trip (with UM) on Lake Superior to visit the ice caves - part of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.  ORBJ enjoyed telling UM where to go in the tandem kayak.  The look on her face was awesome - such a big grin!

FABJ did a great job of stand up paddleboarding (SUP), better than either PL or me.

The only down side is that I cannot find any of my pictures of the trip.  They do not seem to be on my phone, my computer, my Dropbox or my Google drive folder!  So much for technology!

Instead, here are some other random pictures of the family:

Christmas 2013

ORBJ the cowgirl

FABJ getting a workout (unlike the guy in the background)

Montreal 2015

The first stop on our summer vacation was Montreal.  The trip did not get off to a great start.  LBJ went to the doctor the day of our departure to learn that she had walking pneumonia.  So she spent most of the flight sleeping (thank goodness it was nonstop), and then the rest of the day and the following two in bed.

On the other hand, the girls declared that Air Transat was their favorite airline because it had such good food (chicken and rice for lunch).  So at least they were happy.

I spent the first three mornings of our trip at a conference while the kids played in the apartment (we did a house exchange).  Then I got home for lunch and afternoon sightseeing with the kids.  For the first couple of days, we spent a fair bit of time at the Montreal Jazz Festival.  It was quite an enjoyable event, although the girls were bored by the music after about 10 minutes.  But they had a good kids zone, and - more importantly - mango on a stick:

Arm painting and mango on a stick

By Sunday (we arrived on Thursday), LBJ could not take it anymore - she had to get out of the apartment.  So we went for dim sum - we had forgotten how much we liked it.  The girls were a bit less impressed.  Then we went to the Maguerite Bourgeoys Museum, about Montreal's first teacher.  It had a nice view from the top (although it was raining that afternoon) and a great display of her life using dollhouse size toys and a sequence of 25+ cubicles.  Ugh - it's hard to explain but great for kids.

We ate a lot of ice cream in Montreal.  I don't even think we visited the same shop twice.  It was all good.  We also had great bagels (they add honey to the water when cooking them) and pan aux cholocat.

Despite LBJ's illness and an ill-fated museum attempt on a rainy day (tried to go to a museum where half of Montreal was either in the museum or in the line to get into the museum), we had a nice trip.  We would definitely go back.  I even got to attend a couple of sessions at the jazz festival - I don't think I had been to a concert since FABJ was born in 2007.

A little rain but still an enjoyable evening of jazz

The highlights for me were the jazz festival, dim sum, and a bike ride along the Lachine canal.  For the girls, I suspect it was the ice cream, a trip to a local swimming pool, and the Montreal Biodome.

For LBJ, it was getting out of bed.  Ok, probably a bit more than that.

We foolishly decided to drive from Montreal to Toronto, as we flew out of Toronto because it was way cheaper to fly from there rather than Montreal.  It took ages (in part because we had no map and I left Tom Tom, our GPS with North American and European maps, at home).  But we enjoyed detours to the thousand islands on Lake Ontario and Kingston (and we took a while to find an acceptable restaurant for dinner).

We dropped LBJ at Toronto airport and then went to our hotel for the night, as our flight to Minneapolis was not until the next day.  Alas, she had a regatta the following weekend to attend and not enough vacation days to go to Wisconsin with us.

Montreal sculptures and an unhappy ORBJ

On Wisconsin...