June is my Middle Name

Dear Mr. Sun, thank you for finally coming out! Just as I finally pull up the page to reveal the next pixellated image of a random tropical fish on my dollar-store calendar, does summer decide to begin. Yay for June! Of course, summer does not care whether I am stuck in my grey cubicled office or not, so it’s just going to be up to me to put off the cooking and the chores and those other “optional” after-work activities in favour of some quality time outside. It also helps when the one with whom you normally cook meets you after work for some beach time.


All I need is a sunset and a book


Can you tell which one of us was stuck going batty in an office all day and which one spent the day walking in the park and eating gelato?



Moving on to more adventures under the sun, I got a little phone call the following week from my friend Katelyn whose family owns a sweet cabin on a beautiful little lake out in Hope, BC. She was getting people from church together for a weekend out there and wanted us to come! Are there canoes? Yes? Goodbye Saturday shift, hello Lake Kawkawa! As Chris and I had Friday off too so we got to go with the early birds, Katelyn herself, another friend Shelly and her baby Carson who was quiet and beautiful the whole ride there. Arriving before everyone else, we helped unpack the car and then got the first pick of the umpteen bedrooms! That’s right, this place was quite huge (and Chris was scared we’d end up in a leaky ramshackle cabin somewhere in the woods, pffft). More friends started arriving in the evening and before long, we had a little fire going down by the dock and we were just hanging out and enjoying the lake and the evening. The next day involved a bit of laying on the dock, a bunch of canoeing around the lake, sandwich-making for lunch and barbecuing for dinner, all the while hanging out with great people in even greater weather.


The house was at the top of a hill on the road, looking quite small and nondescript from the front, but the minute you enter it you find that it expands into a tall-windowed living room and kitchen, a big patio and another floor that stretches down the hill, followed by a beautifully gardened zig-zag path down to a private dock and boathouse.


The view from the living room


Here’s Chris by the dock, nautical print pashimina and all…


After a serious 10 minutes of canoeing...


...we reached the other side of the lake and this pretty rock.


Turning around, we just happened to notice this pretty rock!


Looks like a nice place to relax after a strenuous afternoon of canoeing, does it not?

At some point between canoeing and barbecuing on Saturday, we were taken on a short adventure to the Othello Tunnels, a series of railway tunnels that were painstakingly blasted through the most treacherous mountains in the Coquihalla Canyon.

It was incredibly gorgeous. Just awe-inspring the way those cliffs loomed above you on both sides and the way the river roared past underneath you and echoed off the sides of the mountain. As for the tunnels, some of them were so pitch-black in places that you couldn’t see a single thing. You could hear water dripping in various places and other people shuffling carefully past you, but your sense of sight was totally gone. The tunnels weren’t small, either. I mean, a train had to pass through them so they were pretty tall and wide. Totally shielded from the sun, too, they were ice cold. Black, drippy, echo-ey, chilly. Can you imagine the eeriness?


I didn’t have my camera along so these pictures come from some tourism website ;) What’s a girl to do?



If I recall the info posts correctly, the railway was supposed to connect BC with the USA for trade, but that route kept getting demolished by landslides and snow and ended up being just too dangerous to use. Now it’s a fabulous rest stop. Nature: 1, Humans: 0.

We spent Sunday morning at the cabin as well, just basking in the time we had left. We canoed a little more and even watched a World Cup Soccer game (Mennonites cheering for Germany, Hah!) Yes that's right, the cabin had a TV too, although we really had to work with the rabbit-ear antennae to get a decent picture. See? We're not afraid of roughing it.

*Sigh*
That weekend was a real treat. It was super super nice of Katelyn to host all of us at her cabin like that and the weather was, as I have probably mentioned numerous times, awesome.

Can't wait to see what July has in store!