We went camping this weekend near Nominingue, northeast of Mont Tremblant. It was fun -- we met our friends Jeff and Anne-Marie, who'd biked there from Tremblant during the day. Maj and Amita June and I brought tons of food and big tents and stuff in the car.
Our drive up was nice; Amita kept saying, "Camping!" every few minutes to emphasize how excited she was about going camping. She's getting much better about longer road trips. She entertains herself, reading books or telling herself stories or looking out the window and thinking out loud. Occasionally we sing songs or color together.
The night was rainy, though, and Amita June slept in a dry but loud tent all night. At about 6AM she woke up angry. "Purple house, NOW!", she said, talking about our house in Montreal, with purple trim. "Shhh, Amita!" Maj said. "We're sleeping in the sleeping bag. We're camping!" "NO CAMPING!" said Amita. So the two of them got up and walked down to Lac Nominingue, while I got some rest.
Later that morning, all the people in the campgrounds around us were smiling. "No camping! Camping no!" became a pretty popular refrain. Ah, well. At least they had a sense of humour about it.
tags: amitajune laurentides camping travel maj jeff annemarie
Inefficient days
Long day today. Brian got back from Halifax (Nova Scotia) on Friday, so we once again have a full house. Which is fun, but it makes it hard to work at home. I went out to Caffè ArtJava near our house early this morning, but their Île Sans Fil? connection was down. So I came home to pick up my bike to ride to Laïka, but the back tire had a hole in it. And I didn't have a pump. Gar. So I spent a couple of hours working out that situation, and by that time I needed to go pick up our moving van.
Maj found a great teak "wall unit" on Montreal Craigslist, and we need the shelves for our living room. So I got a van to pick up the pieces -- it was far too big to fit in our car. And, since my friend Niko wanted to go to IKEA, I traded him an afternoon with the van for help with my wall unit.
He and Maj went off to IKEA as planned, and me at Amita went to the wading pool at Parc La Fontaine. It was a great time, although it's a long walk. I've had a hard time getting Amita onto the back of my bike -- she got pinched once when we were putting on her helmet, and since then she's wanted nothing to do with helmets, bikes, or nothing. If I force her helmet on and stick her in the seat, she loves it, but it's hard to trick her into it. She screams bloody murder when I try to put the helmet on her.
But the pool was fun -- we chased each other up and down through the water. She fell asleep during the walk home, and I managed to get a little work done this afternoon. But Maj and Niko got back around 5:30, and Niko had a comedy show at 7PM and couldn't help me out -- the welcher! So I got Brian to come instead.
The furniture was heavy -- really heavy. Teak is a heavy dang wood. Getting it out of the guy's house was really hard, and getting it up to our second-floor living room was Sisyphean. I'm amazed we didn't break any limbs. But at the end of it all, we had a great-looking new living room, and Maj had made a delicious gazpacho with polenta on the side. Yum!
Hopefully the rest of the week is going to be more productive that today. Niko and I launch a new site at next week's DemoCampMontreal3 (as he so lugubriously pointed out in this blog post). And another group of partners will be launching kei.ki during Wikimania 2007, which is coming up soon.
On top of that, we leave on Thursday for my brother's "commitment ceremony" in San Francisco, announced about 2½ weeks in advance. We were lucky we had lots of miles so we could make the trip, but it still really cuts down on our Montreal summer experience.