Family: It's About Time

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 In the six-odd years Mark and I have been married, we have found that there are two truths about family trips: When we visit my parents, we will do something outdoorsy; and when we visit his parents, we will play hand-and-foot canasta.


It is guarantees like these that make it possible for me to avoid planning activities until we get there. It also makes it so that anything else that we do feels like a bonus. 

Low expectations = high satisfaction. Or something like that.

For example, the visit to my parents overlapped my youngest brother's visit to the parents by 3.25 days. Which means we got to coo over our nieces...and include Jaron and Liz in the obligatory outdoors activity. Bonus.




Also, I went on a second outdoors activity with my dad on e-mountain bikes. Two hour ride, over approximately 26 miles, with only one crash (which was me). And we had been so close to making it all the way without incident! Unfortunately, there was a rock chunk in the path, and I saw it in time to avoid hitting it with my wheels, but not soon enough to avoid clipping it with my pedal and sending me off into the bush. My dad, who had been riding in front, remarked that he supposed he could have warned me, but as this was an off-roads mountain-biking trail, shouting out "rock" would have meant repeating "rock" every 5 minutes. 

Another thing about that bike ride: I think I am a bug magnet. Every once in a while, a grasshopper would ping off my sternum, and I also seemed to have helped clear out two dozen gnats from the air, because by the end of the ride I had them stuck all over my neck with some scattered across my face. Such bug-sweeping seems bound to happen when riding in the front, but contrary to logic, I was riding behind my dad the whole way, and he came out as clean as a [sweaty] whistle.

As for Mark's side of the family, once we got the expected canasta game out of the way, the theme seemed to be bowling. While visiting one of Mark's friends, we went bowling. When Mark's dad was instructed to entertain us, we went bowling. And when we visited Mark's brother, we went bowling. For me, it was an exercise in humiliation: I got a lot of gutterballs, and never scored into the triple digits--in fact, in the pair of games we played with David, my two scores together didn't add to triple digits. 

We didn't just bowl, of course. We went on hikes

some sort of Mongolian fiddle


a dulcimer, with a fiddle in the background

Mark and I each built things with our nephew

I try to be good at sports, but I think I mostly end up being a good sport, and it's not quite the same thing.


~I would love to include more photos, but it is a pain in the neck to format them on blogger.

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 24, 2022 at 1:48 PM

    It was wonderful to see you two!! ♥️♥️

    ReplyDelete

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