Fundraising here at the park

There is a big volunteer contingent here at the park, and some of the biggest are the people who sit on the board of directors. Many of them make a two or three (or more) year commitment to sit in on meetings, come up with ideas, voice their opinion, and have a turn at running the park along with six or eight other people.

As park managers, we are in the special position of being able to see most of what goes on behind the scenes, and these people who sit on the board don't get enough recognition for the hard work they do in benefit of the park.

Happy Canada Day!

July 1st is Canada's birthday, and this year the country celebrates 149 years as a nation.

On this day, there is no better place to be in Canada than the capital city of Ottawa. If you've never been to Ottawa, it's a beautiful city. Ruth and I both grew up in Ottawa, so we know the city well and we have spent many Canada Days downtown enjoying the festivities.

The big weekend is here!

It's a holiday weekend in both Canada and the United States. In Canada, the holiday is on the Friday and in the U.S. the holiday is on the Monday. So here, the campers will be pulling in later this afternoon.

This is the start of our six week busy season. We've still got some open sites though, so it won't be sold out for this weekend. We actually had a few cancellations called in yesterday which is too bad, but we kind of expected that with the water level being so low.

A lot of airfare deals!

Wow, there sure are a lot of great airfare deals out there. I check several times per day for our January 1st (or so) flight to Spain to come on sale, but nothing yet because our return flight is in April of next year. Still tons of time left for the right deal to come along though.

But as I watch for the right price point for that deal, I see all these other deals! Like Toronto to Warsaw, Poland for only $360 CAD return! Wow. Anytime you can fly across the pond for under $400 return, it's a fantastic deal.

Before and after

There are a lot of hedges here in the park, and most of them have never been looked after. At least not for many, many years. So over the past three years, we've been slowly cleaning them out and cutting off the dead stuff and trimming them back.

Ruth did a bunch of work on one messy looking section last week. It was a big job.

When you see a deal, you have to jump on it!

We've been wearing Merrell hiking boots for quite a few years now. And I wear mine every day, so we've learned that I can get a solid two years out of them before it's time for another pair.

And the last pair I bought was in August of 2014, so I figured I had better keep my eyes peeled for a sale online at some point over the next 3 months.

Thinking about new luggage

We've had our Heys rolling backpacks for four years now, and they've been on some fantastic trips with us. And they've served us well. But even though we think they're still ready for another trip or two, we find ourselves looking for something new and different.

The new bags are pretty high tech and of course some of the materials used to make them are much lighter than before. Our current bags weigh 7 lbs empty, and have 45 litres of carrying capacity.

A little busier here at the park

Things are getting a little busier here at the park. It's been a quiet start to the year given that our water level is abnormally low and isn't expected to get much better than it is. But, we still have lots of reservations for the next six weekends as summer gets into full swing.

And it's been a much wetter start to the year as well. It seems that every four or five days we get a decent rainstorm. I'm pretty sure the local farmers are really happy about the farming weather so far this year!

Pretty sure there was a pot of gold...

We went in to town on Wednesday and did all of our running around for new passports. I had done a little bit of research as to the price of passport photos, but I could only find one listing where they actually said the price online, and that was $18.25.

We ended up going to the photo studio that was attached to Walmart, simply assuming that they would be the cheapest.

Wrong!

The little blue car is 10 years old today!

Ten years ago today I signed the deal to buy the little blue car. I had been working at a contract position for GMAC financing at the time, and they offered us a deal for a brand new car at $500 over dealer invoice and 0% financing over four years.

We decided to go for it, and I put in our order for a brand new 2006 Pontiac Wave.

A visit to Bali, Indonesia

Bali is the most popular island for tourists who visit Indonesia. The country of Indonesia itself is actually made up of over 13,000 islands and is the fourth most populated country in the world, with over 260 million people! Only China, India, and the United States have a higher population of people.

And why do people visit Bali?

Time for a new passport!

Our current passports expire August 5th of this year. The last time we got new ones you could only get them renewed for a 5 year period, but this time we're able to go for the relatively new 10 year option.

Of course they're also slightly more money, at $160 for the 10 year versus $120 for a 5 year one.

Six weeks of Xplornet

Well, we've used our new Xplornet satellite internet service for just over six weeks now and so we thought we should give an early review.

So far...it's not perfect, and it's not the same as having high speed internet in the city. But it's far, far better than the cellular internet that we had the last two years.

RV'ing in Spain

We aren't going to be making much in the way of plans for our two month motorhome trip to Spain next January and February. It's all going to be new to us, so we'll simply drive when we want to and stop when we want to.

Fortunately, we've had a really good website forwarded on to us that's going to help us quite a lot with finding our overnight spots.

I think we'll just avoid the U.S.

I thought about booking our flight back to Europe yesterday. A deal came up at a decent price ($584 CAD, or $460 USD) from Ottawa to Paris leaving after Christmas and returning in April.

But, it connected in Philadelphia. That causes a minor problem.

Because my current U.S. "Waiver of Inadmissability" expires in November.