When Aidan woke up this morning, at 5:30am, I bet he didn’t think that we’d get him up, fed, dressed, and stuffed in the truck.

As a matter of fact, neither did I.

But, hey, that’s how things go. We were intending to head down to Seattle today to do some cross-border shopping with our recently superior Loonie, and we intended to head down early, but I was thinking somewhere between 8am and 9am. By 9am today, we were almost in Bellingham with four caches under our belt. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The boy woke up at 5:30am, and didn’t go back to sleep. After some discussion, we decided to get up and get moving. Of course, Aidan calling “Change the bed!” helped getting us moving too. Note to selves, no-name diapers really don’t do well for overnight. We were actually on the road by 6:30am, much to my shock. Both Gwen and Aidan were awake — and happy?!?

The reason we wanted to be away early was because of The Border. On a good day, Seattle’s about 2 1/2 hours away. A “good day” means spending 5 minutes at the border. Last weekend at the peak rush, simply crossing The Border meant waiting 2-3 hours in itself. Clearly this is untenable with a toddler, so we aimed to avoid the rush. Not that we knew when the rush actually was, but a good rule of thumb seems like “earlier is better”. And then there’s the decision: Which crossing? Peace Arch? Pacific Highway (aka the Truck Crossing)? As it turns out, at 7:15am today the wait was only 30 minutes at the Truck Crossing.

Of course, that meant we were in Blaine before 8am. Less than 2 hours to Seattle … and it’s a Sunday … and the Seattle Premium Outlets don’t open until 10am. What to do?!?

Geocaching of course! We had loaded the GPS up with a bunch of close-to-I-5 caches, and before we knew it we had four in hand and it wasn’t 9am yet. Woot!

We continued south, with ongoing success with the caches. Now, what I haven’t mentioned so far is the rain. Pouring yesterday, pouring today. In fact, today was quite a bit worse than yesterday. I was fighting with the car, the wind, and the rain the whole day. It also makes for damp caching, so by the time we reached Bellingham, we let up on the caching and drove south.

I’ll spare you the details about shopping, but we did pick up sneakers and lots of clothes. It’s like Christmas time! Clothes (and cars, apparently) are some of the few things that actually cost significantly less in the States.

Coming back up I-5 meant picking up caches on the other side of the road! :)

Of course crossing The Border in a northerly direction causes some trepidation too … when’s the rush back into Canada? Which crossing (again)? How much tax/duty will we have to pay? We debated eating supper before making the trek back home, but one thing lead to another, and we ended up queued at the Truck Crossing again without having eaten supper. Actually, the crossing north wasn’t too bad, something like 40 minutes. The actual exchange with the CBS agent went something like: CBSA: Where do you live? A: Vancouver, CBSA: Where’d ya go? A: Seattle, CBSA: Value? A: About $600, CBSA: Good day.

That’s it. No passports, no receipts, not even complete questions or sentences!!! Ah well. Happy to be home.

Gwen will have more to say about the trip. I think she has some funny anecdotes to share.

PS: 8 cache finds today, 1 TB dropped off, 4 picked up. Nothing compared to the 26 that EastCoastTwo picked up today on Easy Street! That brings them to 110, just slightly fewer than our 175. They should eclipse us by the end of October! Congrats M&D!

Hmmm, we’re busy! And having fun!

Between fixing up the Myth box, then a business trip to Seattle, and caching, poker last Sunday, wow! Who has time to blog? :>)

I don’t see how, but Gwen’s been keeping up. You have been reading, right?

The boy is growing up so quickly. It just amazes me how fast things change. His language continues to expand and grow. We’ve been working on colours after worrying that he didn’t quite seem to “get” colours, but he’s mostly got them nailed now.

So, here are a few pictures…

And, we got our hands on a film scanner! Here’s a sample:

Well, when I got up this morning, I certainly didn’t expect to be answering questions at the Burnaby Detachment of the RCMP today. But plans never seem to go as expected.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Today, after having a not-quite-total-loss of a weekend due to incompatible schedules with the boy and Gwen, and due to uncooperative weather, we were determined to get some geocaching in.

I located a suitable cluster 10 caches within a 1 km radius out in South Burnaby and we were off around 10:30am. The weather was overcast with light showers, typical for the weekend. We picked up the first cache pretty easily; it was a drive by in a small park underneath the SkyTrain.

The second cache, however, seemed to be in someone’s hedge (street side) on a quiet residential street. With plenty of people around this Labour Day, including what seemed to be a pack of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Gwen made a quick check, but the muggle pressure was getting to be too much.

Fortunately, there were a few more caches nearby, and they didn’t prove too elusive. After grabbing those ones, we tried again with the one in the hedge, and this time came up with a purse. I checked in the purse to see if it was a poor choice of a cache location, but no. In fact, it was full of someone’s ID. We hit the GPS and got it to route us to the nearest police station.

The Burnaby RCMP detachment is in Deer Lake Park, and beside the Burnaby Village Museum. We’d not been to any of the detachment, the park, or the museum, so it was quite in line with the spirit of why we do the geocaching!

The conversation at the detachment, though, was a little uncomfortable.

Me: I found this purse and noticed it had ID in it. We brought it here right away.

RCMP: Where did you find it?

Me: I found it underneath the hedge at this address (gives the nice lady a parking receipt with an address scribbled on the back)

RCMP: What were you doing underneath the hedge at that address?

Me: Um … have you heard of geocaching?

RCMP: No.

It went downhill from there. There a few more questions on where I found it, who’s house it was, and what it was I was doing there. Then she asked me to leave my name, phone number, address, and the time I discovered the purse … and the nice lady scribbled it all down on the back of the parking receipt.

On leaving the RCMP detachment, we noticed that there was a Carousel advertising free admission! The carousel is part of the Burnaby Village Museum — a real, old-style carousel with a mechanical music machine, and old-style horses going up and down, and the works. Aidan had a blast! After sucking us in with the free carousel, we paid the admission to go into the Village Museum, where they had face painting, a touchless petting-zoo, and turn-of-the-century (the 20th century, that is) demonstrations of smithing, farming, cars (ok, slightly after turn-of-the-century), and general “what life was like” exhibits and buildings. It was much more extensive than I expected (although not quite Sherbrooke Village).

Gwen and Aidan rode the carousel again on our way out of the Village Museum, despite the (now) incredible line-up.

We left the park and decided to go back to the park we were in before, to pick up a few more caches — in particular one where there was a Travel Bug that hadn’t moved for quite some time. We picked up one, and headed down the hill for the other, only to discover we were decidedly on the wrong side of a very steep ravine. We piled the (now) cranky toddler back into the car, threw the gear back in the car and drove around to the other side. It was a successful TB rescue.

We grabbed a quick bite to eat (um, 4pm … but we had snacks, drinks, and a “pizza bread” for Aidan during our sojourn) and headed back into Vancouver to dump the TB collection we had amassed.

It was pretty close to 7pm when we arrived back.

So, the day didn’t quite turn out as expected, but the rain held off, we had fun, discovered a new part of the city we wouldn’t have visited otherwise, and at the moment I’m not in jail.

What will next weekend bring?

After the world’s. Slowest. Drive-through. Service. we made it to the drive in last night.

The first movie was “Hairspray” (not bad, but not great)l. It started at 8:30pm and ran for two hours.

And Aidan thought it was great. “Look!” “Movie!” “Dancing!” “Singing!”

For the whole two hours. We cuddled him. We strapped him in his seat. We created a “bed” for him in the trunk with blankets and his pillow. The movie, and trucks, and people were just too distracting.

At 10:30pm, between the shows (the next one was “Rush Hour 3”, more or less forgettable) we tried in earnest to get him to sleep. In the end, Gwen crawled in the back with him, and eventually got him to sleep.

It was after 1pm when we got home (the third show was “Transformers”, but Gwen didn’t really want to see it, and I don’t think I would have stayed awake…) and the boy into his own bed.

And, wouldn’t you know it, for once he cooperated! It wasn’t until 8:45am that he woke up this morning.

Final verdict: not a raging success, but also not a disaster. Certainly better than the last time!