We went on vacation on the Friday before the 1st. We went to Raymond to Roger's Family reunion. It was 4 days of fun with the Family. We discovered that Jacob is allergic to Mosquitoes. He had a golf ball on the side of his face, and then on the side of his foot. Poor guy. It was a ton of fun at the reunion. The kids made lots of friends and they had a great time at the candy parade.
We saw lots of cousins and grandma. Jacob even gave her kisses. He never gives me kisses(pout, pout). Here are some pictures of the reunion and stuff.
Roger and his mom

Note Tarin standing there twirling her hair while everyone scrambles for candy! Pretty typical.

all the kids at the family reunion waiting for the candy parade to start. There were a lot!

Tarin

I am Roger!


After Raymond we decided to go the back way to Tobi and Jeff's house. We got to Nakusp at 1am and decided to stay the night. (good thing too because you have to get off this place with a ferry to go to Tobi's house and we didn't know that. We would have missed the hotel we got if we would have kept going) We found only one hotel open and it was a biker hotel. We were a little scared but booked a room anyways. It turned out to be the oldest Hotel in BC. It actually wasn't bad. It had it's own bathroom and the beds were clean so we were happy. When we woke up in the morning the view was amazing. It sat on a lake with a garden that was gorgeous. the kids and I went for a walk in the garden and along the lake while Roger did some work at the hotel. It was very lovely.
Leland Hotel wiht Tarin and Alia posing in front.

Alia wanted to pose and say how hot it was. Tarin heard the word pose and said I want to do the tree pose (my yoga girl!!)

The garden out front of the Hotel. It was very beautiful and very smelly(in a great way)

Then we went to Halcyon hot springs. We asked where we could camp for the night and they said that they let people camp in the grassy field. So we set up tent , stole all the firewood from the surrounding fire rings and went swimming. Just as we got swimming, it started to rain a

nd Roger decided that he should go check on the tarp or put it on or something. So he went and did that and when he came back, he slipped on the very very very slippery stairs and hit his arm. Nobody realized how bad it was until he looked at it later. I was up in the hot pool at that point and he came up and said "Lori, look at this" when he showed me the entire pool gasped. It was like someone put a baseball in half and put it on his arm. It was awful! So poor Roger had to sit out on the deck with ice on his arm. It went down a little but later spread to his entire forearm. It really does look bad. I hope we get something out of it because it was a very bad bruise and it is still

bugging him. He is going to have the Dr. look at it. That night we went grocery shopping and got some hotdogs etc and come back to the camp site to discover that we had left the hotdog roasting stick at the store. Alia said that we "won't be able to have any fun now" but we went through the kindling and found the skinniest sticks (not especially skinny though) and set them up to roast with rocks supporting them since they were quite short. We roasted marshmallows and had smores. I think it was more fun not having the roasting stick and improvising(even Alia says so). btw did I mention that the tent was missing the tent pegs so we used kindling for that as well? It

was a makeshift camp that used what we had around us but was very very fun. We really secured the tarp on top because it looked like it would rain and it was a good thing too. It poured!!! For about 2 hours and then it was done. It started right after the kids had gone to sleep. So they weren't worried about it. Right when I needed to go to the bathroom, it stopped. It was very accommodating.
We swam for a while the next day, sat out for a thunder storm, Had yummy hot chocolate on Halcyon, swam some more, then went to Tobi's house.
At Tobi's house, we visited, went to the beach, went to a ward activity (Jeff tore his hamstring playing paintball) and had a nice time. On Monday we went to the waterslides while Roger worked, then went on to Lisa's house. At Lisa's house we went to ride on a train ride, played at the park and played at the spray park while Roger worked. It was a lot of fun! We decided to stay one more day and so while Roger worked we went to IKEA and played outside. It was good.
The only downside to the time spent with my sisters was the fact that I had developed a nasty headache. I had discovered that it was a sinus one and could be calmed with Sudafed with Tylenol and Advil every 4 hours. I am going to the Dr. this afternoon. Hopefully she can do something for me because it is really bad and had been almost a week.
So even though it seems like it was a comedy of errors with hurts and allergies and what not, we really did have a very nice time on our vacation.