Weeeee’re back! We’ve returned from our family road trip to beautiful Penticton, BC this past weekend and we had a blast! We spent most of the day Friday soaking up the sun at Okanagan Lake in the newly fenced in and designated off-leash doggie beach with Oliver and Winston. Oliver was happy to be free to swim without the burden of his leash and really enjoyed fetching his floating orange chew toy. It was Winston’s first beach experience and we weren’t sure what to expect.  He was quick to chase after Ollie, even into the water, until he realized he could no longer touch the bottom. Though his rear end sank like a brick, his doggie instincts prompted him to paddle as fast as his little front legs could and he was an absolute riot. Once he got used to the idea of the ground disappearing from beneath him he would make short trips out into the lake after us, as long as we weren’t too far. Once he reached us we’d pick him up (more like he’d climb up our legs) to give him a break before sending him between us or back to shore. He loved it! They both did. Towards the end of our swim you could tell Oliver was exhausted but he just couldn’t resist the urge to swim out and back a few more times. We took a nap in the sun to dry and it was a pretty perfect day.
The rest of the weekend we spent visiting with friends and family. We had dinner with Lucas’ mom, spent time with Clay and Alyson and met baby Aiden, and had dinner and games with Lucas’ dad & Linda and grandma and grandpa Karpiuk. It was boys vs. girls in an intense game that seemed to be a mix of a little Aggravation and Sorry. The girls won, of course! On Sunday we had a picnic lunch with the game crew on the shores of Okanagan Lake between Penticton and Summerland. It was beautiful. Afterwards, the boys took a nap and Lucas took me on my first Sea-Doo ride ever. We rented a 2-seater for a half hour and took turns driving. It was awesome! We definitely need to get one of those.
So, the moment you’ve read all the way to the end for… of course there are pictures!  And knowing me, there are literally hundreds. I think by day two of our long weekend I had already taken 237 photos. Mostly of the boys playing on the beach. Can you imagine how photo happy we’ll be when we have REAL kids? There’s even a couple little video clips I put together of some of our adventures that you can watch as a six and a half minute long movie HERE. All of our photos can be found in our gallery under Travel, British Columbia Summer 2008, or via direct link to the HTML version of the gallery HERE.  Enjoy!