Thursday: traffic

Ugh, the traffic.

They've been doing construction on a road since...March or so...and it finally hit a busy intersection.  It's been a little annoying before, but for the last three weeks a major intersection that leads to the south side of Holland has been closed.  It isn't the intersection itself though, so while very annoying as long as I remember it the detour isn't too bad.

Fast forward to something this week when they decided to close a close-by intersection too in order to work on the railroad tracks.  Now they've closed a north-south road and an east-west road: my normal route and my secondary route.  This has caused traffic to become insane.  Last week I was trying to cross back to the north side of Holland and it was bad but the traffic was moving.  Today I tried and it took me forever to go a short block.  Google said it would take me 20 minutes to get home (instead of a normal five minutes) but I didn't believe it.  So I went the extra-long way around because there are only two real options to go between the north and south sides of Holland due to a lake.  There was still a busy stretch, but we were at least moving.  It took me 20 minutes to get home (so 30 all told).  I still think it was the correct choice, but I really hope they open up the railroad tracks soon.

vacation Saturday (Aug 20): mostly at sea

While the itinerary says Victoria today, the Victoria stop is super short and we didn’t book any excursions so we’ll just be having another boat day. We once again woke up at a decent time (7:30am) which means tomorrow’s wake up to go to the airport is going to be so annoying. Our internal clocks are changing just in time to go home, as expected.

It was a grey morning, so we decided to go in the hot tub. We easily found an empty one and brought our books in. We did take a brief dip in the pool which was refreshing and not nearly as cold as we had been expecting. However, the hot tub was right next to the fog horn. We heard it a few times as we got in and then it stopped, but around the time we were getting close to getting out it started again.  Every time it went off I jumped. A lot. So it encouraged us to get out just a bit faster.

Neither of us were hungry, so we were planning on having a late lunch and then seeing the magic show.

However, whales appeared! There were so many. We were actually talking to the kids when we saw

the first two (and the closest ones that we saw) and I yelled, “whale!” There were a few times we saw

four or five spouts all together. Most of the whales were pretty far away, but the spouts were still easy

to spot and the binoculars came in handy. We ordered room service near the beginning of the whales

and although it took a while to get to us it worked well.

Wednesday: Stu Visser Trail

I went on a walk with Cheryl this morning.  I finally made it to the end of the Stu Visser trail!  It seems like this shouldn't be a big deal as the trail is about .7 miles, but it's been flooded most of the times I've gone.  The last time we went it wasn't flooded, but we meandered for a while before then and so we turned back before reaching the end of the trail.  Afterwards Ben joined us for lunch.

Since the car is parked outside it gets all dewy and the boys really liked the patterns that were made once I started driving this morning.

vacation Friday: Happy Birthday!

We actually slept to an almost normal time this morning: 7am. I was a bit worried about this; I expect

that we’ll start getting used to the time change just as it is time to go home. We went to one of the

downstairs restaurants today for breakfast because they had a chocolate croissant and as always it was

delicious. They also had a pretty good almond croissant, but there wasn’t quite enough marzipan in it.

The weather in the morning was foggy. There isn’t really anything for us to see besides the waters of

the Pacific ocean today though, so I guess it isn’t a big deal. We do have some blue glass as our balcony

walls, and it always makes the water look bluer than it actually is. It’s a good trick.

Do you see my birthday cake?

We did a scavenger hunt this morning. We were paired with two other people which actually worked

out really well; they knew were a lot of things were. It was also a race, which was unexpected. We tied

for the win! It ended up being a lot of fun…we all got into it, even though at the beginning we all said

that we didn’t really care about winning much.

The winners!  Our medals even say 'winner' on them.

In front of the Discovery sign

Pretending to get out of the water

A wedding proposal by the chaple

By my fish that I never saw on the monitors

We rested for a while in the room and watched a movie. We did take another walk about the boat,

stopping for some pictures and to play some mini-golf. I won! They also were missing holes 5 and 6,

which seemed rather strange.

Dinner was in a special dining room. It was a five course meal and absolutely delicious. It started out

with bread and bruschetta, followed by fried calamari, linguini carbanara, veal, and an assortment of

desserts. I also got a birthday cake and off-key song, which we elected to bring back to the room for

later. (The cake that is, not the song.) If I did it again, I’d probably ask for half portions of everything. I

still only ate about half of everything and was still completely stuffed at the end. Speaking of birthday cake, it was my 40 th birthday today! There are digital signs all over the boat keyed to the medallion thing you need to wear, so they were often saying “Happy Birthday Amanda H!” But…they were rather tricky. They only did it sometimes when I was nearby. Or they’d do it after I was waiting there for a minute due to the elevators. It was so much fun trying to find them.

Although we had plans to find a hot tub at night, we ended up reading. We were both in the middle of

good books and sometimes that’s a hard thing to put down.

Tuesday: work

It was a pretty normal day today.  I felt like both classes had a good rhythm to them, which was nice.  Several students also realized they didn't have a good grasp of references ($) in excel, but now is a good time to figure that out.

We ordered a new garage door from a different company.  It will be installed on Friday and was significantly cheaper.

I went to karate.  We were working on our forms, which is always my favorite part.  He ended up splitting the class into groups and both adults knew our form well so we got to work on some of the more technical parts: how to stomp your foot, holding your arm at a 60deg angle instead of a 45deg, etc.  I really like it when we get this nitty-gritty because ...I'm not sure why.  I just do.  It doesn't happen very often though because I don't always learn the form until right before testing.

Monday: star student

Joshua is star student in his class this week!  (It's a bit weird because last year he was almost last and this year he's first.)  He worked hard on his poster this past week but I forgot to grab a picture of it before it went to school.  He's also been planning for his show and tell with great consideration!

Otherwise, not much to report today.  Joshua and I had great dental check-ups.  As part of O:CtH I worked on the purple bathroom, but since we had people over yesterday Isaac had actually cleaned/picked up a lot of it.

 

Sunday: play date

Isaac was supposed to have a playdate after church, but it was raining.  (It was very rainy which was lovely.)  So the family came over here instead and it was a lot of fun.  The adults played several games and the kids played well together.