Our home in the hills

We said a temporary goodbye to Peggy’s place and shifted our stuff over to Donna & Sam’s for a few days of good conversation, relaxation and eating! Donna had planned a turkey dinner for the family (our third!!), so we ate, laughed, and got introduced to some silly iPhone app (snap chat??) that put cartoon mouse ears on my head.

Technology … making the world a sillier place, one mouse-face at a time.

The next day Donna took us to visit Monique and Chris’ place … actually, we went to visit their dog Wally. He’s an extremely  cute, smart, and rambunctious little fur ball. We spent an hour or so being entertained as Donna played with Wally, and attempted to outsmart him when it was time to come in (it was a close match 😉 )

After a few days we moved back over to Peggy’s … a real refuge in this crazy Calgary city. It overlooks the green space known as Fish Creek Provincial Park, which is ripe with deer and pheasants that come right up to the window. It’s all very peaceful.

While there Peggy invited all the kids, both young and old , over for another yummy dinner. The following day Phil took the old kids over to Calgary’s new National Music Centre, a place that celebrates Canadian music. Phil, who worked on site for years, gave us the VIP tour, including getting us into places off-limits to mere mortals.

After visiting the centre we went out for dinner, and then went over to Phil’s son’s place to visit Dylan, Chantal and their two cute kids, Theo and Vida.

We spent the last few days in Calgary at Peggy’s place, relaxing and just enjoying our time there.

The day finally came for us to head off towards our new temporary home in Penticton. With winter making a showing, and learning about a major rock slide that was causing delays along our intended route, we decided to leave a day early and break the drive up over two days.

A few hours into the first day we came to the rock slide along the Trans-Canada. If we had arrived a 1/2 hr earlier we probably would have got through quickly, but we arrived just in time for them to begin paving a temporary detour. A wait of three+ hours ensued. Good thing we had lots of time.

We stopped in Golden for the night , and then made the final push to our new temporary home in the hills of the Okanagan valley. We are house and cat sitting through the winter here, so it was appropriate that the first one to greet us once we arrive was Maxi the Cat. He is an orange tabby, very cute and easy going, but with typical ‘cat’ attitude. He definitely sees us as the latest hired staff ;-).

Leslie and Dave (the permanent cat staff) greeted us warmly and made us feel right at home. It’s fun to meet fellow adventurous spirits. They are retired professionals who are also RVers, ballooners and wine connoisseurs. Their home, which we get to enjoy over the next five months, is comfortable and, by our recent standards, quite luxurious.

So now we’re getting to know our new temporary home of Penticton, and enjoying the relaxing time here in this lovely house. Mostly we’re making sure the boss Maxi is well looked after.