The cottage

I thought I'd put in a few pictures of where I am spending my summer days. First is the view from the front deck, then the cottage itself (with our 2 dogs), my herb garden in the back that I started last year, and finally my scrapbooking area. The printer is off to the left sitting on top of a Victrola record player cabinet, quite an interesting mix of technology! (Sorry no picture of that. Maybe later.)

Thoughts about the beach

When we first started coming to this beach, we rented a cottage for 1 week. The next year we rented a different one for 2 weeks a couple of times and we then had this same cottage for two complete summers the 2 years after that. The summer of the first cottage I had one little 1 1/2 year old girl and was pregnant with the second, the second year I had a baby and a toddler. By our last summer in the rented cottage, there were 3 little girls: a 7 year old, a 5 year old and a 1 1/2 year old. That was the year (1991) that we started building our own cottage in the same general area. Every year since then we have come to spend the summers here, moving in as soon as the school year finished, and moving back just in time to start a new school year. My though have things changed! When the girls were little, we spent a part of every sunny day at the beach. We (meaning chiefly Mom) would carry our collection of necessary items on the 5-min walk to the beach: towels, pails, shovels, various other toys, snorkels, swim goggles, boxes of juice...and so on. We would swim and dig and make sand castles, and collect and identify shells. Sometimes we would come back for lunch and go again! At the end of the day we would have lovely outside showers ( we have an enclosed outdoor shower stall) and I would wash the sand out of the girls' bathing suits and hang them up to dry for another day. That was the routine.

Fast forward to the present day. The oldest girl is 22. She likes to stay at the cottage when she can, but generally she stays at the house in town where she is working. Last summer she wasn't here at all, and next summer...who knows? The middle girl is 20 and is living in another province, going to university and working in the summer. She's not here. The youngest is still here, but sleeps in most mornings and then finds the cottage "boring". I told her that soon she won't be here either. We rarely spend the day at the beach, except if someone comes to visit. We take walks there, as we did last evening after supper. We enjoy the quiet and the relatively cool temperatures (compared to in town). My husband and I (and certainly the dogs and cats) enjoy the cottage as much as ever, but our use of it has changed so much. Maybe one day there will be grandchildren come to visit and the days of pails and shovels, shell collecting and jumping in the waves will start all over again.

Tubing

I have discovered a new joy...tubing! While on a weekend away with my husband and a group of friends at a fishing camp (really nice fishing camp, okay...I don't do roughing it), a group of us, five women decided to try tubing down the river on Saturday afternoon. Some had done it before. The owner of the lodge called this guy who came to get us and took us up river and supplied us with big tubes, including an extra one that he helped us rope a life jacket in the middle of, and then a small cooler was roped to that and set on the life jacket. The rope was wrapped all around this middle tube and we all had a bit to hang onto so we would stay together. It was so much fun! Very relaxing, just floating down the river for about an hour and a half, chatting, looking around at nature and the different fishing "pools" where people from our group had been fishing, drinking our bottled drinks from the cooler and enjoying the sunny afternoon. I decided if I had a handy river and a way to get upstream I could do that a couple of times a week! The picture is one my husband took of us as we were arriving back at the camp.