One last hurrah!

Labour Day Weekend. The weekend that typically signals the end of summer here in Canada. So for any people who like to go camping, this is the last opportunity. Many people have children who go back to school on Tuesday, and then they'll get back into their regular schedules and the RV will be put away for the season.

So, our park is pretty busy with end of season campers!

A hunter, I am not.

Ruth took the little blue car into town the other day to do our weekly grocery shopping. She went alone. Or at least she thought she did.

Turns out she had a passenger.

Travel Photo Roulette - We have a winner!

Last week, we hosted the 85th edition of Travel Photo Roulette. Lots of interesting entries, and we had to deliberate a bit to choose the winner.

You can view the entries here... http://www.travelwithkevinandruth.com/2014/08/travel-photo-roulette-85-hiking.html

Free $100 Amazon Gift card!

The other day, we told you about Cathay Pacific Airlines. And readers of Travel with Kevin and Ruth are very astute and would have noticed at the bottom of that article that Cathay Pacific has partnered with us to sponsor a giveaway.

And what a giveaway it is!

Help Wanted

Driving around the nearby town of Swift Current, all you see are "Help Wanted" signs in every store window. The local Walmart has had a billboard out front saying "Now Hiring" since we arrived here at the end of April.

Now, we're trying to get one of our bathroom buildings renovated here at the park and we can't find anybody to do the job!

I got a deal!

I think.

Well, it was a deal...until I had to have it shipped to Canada. But it would have been a real deal if I lived in the U.S.! Why do they make these things so difficult...?

Well that was a washout!

Man, what a miserable weekend that was. Woke up to wind and rain yesterday morning and it didn't stop until sometime early this morning. We actually had to put the furnace on in our house trailer! Yes, it's still August but the high yesterday was only 11C (52F)!

I think we had three die hard campers here overnight.

The Strange Story of Sixto Rodriguez

We watched a documentary the other night, and it was such a fascinating story that I have to tell you about it.

One of the things that made it interesting to us is that a part of it takes place in South Africa, and having been there made it all the more entertaining. But even if you've never been to South Africa, this movie is so worth watching.

Water, water, everywhere!

I read a statistic the other day that says the average person in North America uses 100 gallons (378 litres) of water per day!

They don't say how they arrive at that figure, but it must include everything from laundry to showers to flushing the toilet to watering your front lawn if you have one.

Becoming a Saskatchewanderer

So, remember last week I ordered a pair of hiking boots online? Well I went into town on Tuesday and picked them up at the post office. Opened the box when I got back to the park, and they're exactly what I was looking for. They fit perfectly, but they'll take a few kms of hiking to get them broken in.

So, the whole "have you ever bought footwear online" experience worked out well. But it could have been slightly better. Here's why...

Travel Photo Roulette #85: Hiking

Never heard of Travel Photo Roulette? Well now you have! I've actually followed it on and off for the last year or so, and I've even entered a couple of photos along the way. This time, we actually won!

The last edition of Travel Photo Roulette was hosted by Richelle at Adventures Around Asia. The theme she picked was "Candid".

Six weeks to go...

Things feel like they are winding down here at the campground, but there's still exactly six weeks to go for us. One of our employees has already headed back to school, and the other one is down to weekends only.

Although, we've got him coming in for a few hours tomorrow so that I can go into town with Ruth. It'll probably be our only excursion together until we leave here October 1st.

These are some different camping rigs!

Even when we're not camping ourselves, we're always interested in what types of different units are out there that other people use. It seems to us that the designs used in other countries are much more efficient than what is available here in North America.

I know part of that has to do with fuel economy because gas prices are so cheap in our part of the world. But still, we don't seem very innovative when it comes to our camping rigs.

Citychase

I was up too late to do a blog post yesterday, but still early enough to help our son Alex and his friend and teammate Matt do their "citychase" race.

I had never heard of this before, but it's been going on since 2007, I think. It's held in 8 major cities in Canada. It's become such a big event in Toronto that they actually do two races.

For the birdwatchers out there...

Kevin has a task to do this morning which I am sure he will talk about in tomorrow's post, so it was either take a day off from the blog or turn the blog over to me (Ruth!). Seeing that you are reading this blog post I guess you can figure out what the choice ended up being.

Booked!

Well, I've been looking since May for a way to get us down to Mexico and our friends in Puerto Escondido. It all came together at once yesterday, so now we're booked!

I actually booked three separate flights yesterday, and each of them was a fantastic deal!

Good news and car problems

So maybe I should have said "good news and bad news". But, I already have the car problems fixed, so it wasn't really that bad.

Wednesday is the day that Ruth usually heads into the big city of Swift Current to do the weekly grocery shopping. So we got the little blue car all loaded up with recycling returns, and off she went.

She was back at the house less than an hour later.

Have you ever bought footwear online?

We never have. Until now, that is!

As our regular readers know, we do a lot of hiking when we're traveling. That means we put a lot of miles on our hiking boots, and we don't only wear them for hiking. When we're traveling, we travel very light which usually means that we only have one other pair of footwear with us, and that's usually a pair of sandals.

Secrets the Government is Hiding About Elephants

Today is World Elephant Day!

So in celebration, we dug up some interesting facts about elephants. And, it gives us an opportunity to show you some more of the photos we took in Namibia of the worlds biggest land mammal.

Our last busy weekend?

And a fairly uneventful one at that. This park is attended by a lot of locals, and many of the locals are involved in farming. This is the week when harvest begins to take place, and so the farmers and usually their families as well are busy.

Even too busy to take time off to go camping on weekends!

I can't see this working...

I read an article the other day that Ontario Provincial Parks are experimenting with a plan to bring people RV'ing who don't own an RV.

Yes, they are renting out "trailer equipped" campsites.

Jeju Island

We've been spending a little more time planning our month of October in Korea. One of the places we're wanting to visit is called Jeju Island.

Many of you will remember the horrible ferry disaster that occurred in April of this year when 300 people were killed. This ferry had been heading from the Korean mainland to Jeju Island.

How to make Jamaica (a cool refreshing drink!)

Jamaica (pronounced in Spanish as Ha-Mike-Ah) is a popular cold drink in Mexico. Sometimes known as Hibiscus Tea in other parts of the world, because it's made from the flowers of the hibiscus plant.

We really like this drink, and Ruth found that she can buy the dried flowers at Bulk Barn here in Canada.

Lost my keys!

I did find them again, so no need to panic. But it's not a good feeling while they're missing, that's for sure.

I have this one pair of pants that don't have very good pockets in the front. So I had been putting my keys in my back pocket, which isn't really very comfortable when you go to sit down! And I'm used to putting my keys in my right front pocket.

One employee gone...

First of all, thanks for all of the comments and ideas regarding yesterday's post topic. I'm certainly going to have to do some further research on the topic, and that's going to involve actually going out to look at some of these products in person to see exactly what they look and feel like in person.

Our old laptops

Wow...slept in this morning! Ruth looks at the clock and says "that can't be right!". It was 7:45am!

But it was correct. It's a bit of a dull morning with some rain, so it wasn't very bright outside. Plus, I had been up until 11:30pm or so counting the weekend's receipts to be handed in, so I guess I was tired.

A day in the life of campground managers

Ruth was up around 7:00am yesterday. I was closer to 7:30am. Slept like a rock. I had called the RCMP and asked if they could do a drive through late Saturday evening, and apparently they had done so. They even called back and left a message that everything was okay.

After the fireworks, most people had called it a night, so we were a little surprised that it was a fairly quiet Saturday night considering it was a long weekend and we're full up.

But yesterday during the day was busy for us.

Fireworks!

I'm impressed that individual campers in a little regional park like this can raise $2,000 in private donations to put on a spectacular fireworks show.

And word gets out, and people came from miles around to watch the show. I heard several regulars saying that the park had never been so full. And, we had no late night problems last night!

Three drunks and a fire ring

Wow, busy day yesterday. And the campground is full. We got everybody checked in okay, with one exception. Turned out okay, but it could have been a pain.

So this one lady checked in to a tenting site that she had reserved. She asked for a load of firewood to be delivered, but when Russell went to drop it off, he said the site was empty.

July Expenses

Wow, today is the first day of August! Time is flying. We are 3/5 of the way through our contract here. And after this weekend, the park will be slowly emptying out over the next six weeks.

July expenses were pretty much right on schedule, in fact we had a pretty cheap month.