SLI Winter Getaway Adventure

Ahhh, it feels good to be back writing on the blog. I have spent the last two and a half days up north snowed in at a cottage without my laptop - it was great.  Time to catch up for what happened the last three days.

Sunday Morning:  Parking! This month I get to serve by helping people park before the 1st service and in-between the two services.   I love it. Sunday was snowy and cold, but it was still a ton of fun. I love directing people to where they are suppose to park or to another person who will park them. And I love being the first one to welcome them to our House, Koinonia, with a big smile, a wave and just friendly directions for parking!  The past two Sunday's I have mostly been on welcoming, which is right as the cars pull into the parking lot - I am literally the first person they see, and then I direct them to the next parking server who has an open spot available.

After the services I ate the lunch I packed and brought by bags of cloths and snowsuits and stuff into the church to wait to load them into the church van.  Finally we were off (around 1:30-ish).  We drove two-ish hours north west to Port Elgin Ontario, Canada, where the Flemings (Pastor and his family - including Bryce) have a cottage in a wooded area near a lake. When we got to Port Elgin, we stopped at a Walmart to get food for our stay.  Bryce and Heidi had split our class up ahead of time into three cooking groups, Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.  I was in the breakfast group.  Each group was given the budget of $50 to get the supplies for their meal to serve 12 hungry people.  

After Walmart we drove a few minutes to the cottage. However when we got there the driveway had too much snow to drive through. So us guys got out and started to shovel the snow away while the girls unloaded the van and Bryce's car.  As we were putting away the shovels, the guy across the street came out and told us that we could park our vehicles in the neighbors circle drive, since it was already plowed and he was gone for the week.  We figured that wasn't needed since we had already shoveled our driveways entry pile (just the first few feet, since that was the deepest part. The rest seemed drivable in).  So Bryce said we could go ahead inside and unpack while he parked the vehicles.  However, a few minutes later Bryce came and got us. The van wasn't able to make it through our drive and got stuck.  So we pushed it out and Bryce parked both the van and the car in the neighbors drive.

Bryce gave us a bit to get our snow stuff on to go for a hike out by the lake.  We drove out to the park-like area and started our "hike" (more just a walk).  It was beautiful and a ton of fun.  Here and there snowballs flew between those who wanted to take part in the snow attacks (I was one of them).  And while we "attacked" each other, we all were attacking Bryce with snow.  The whole time we were throwing snow at him, and he would return fire.  From time to time either him, or one of us, would stop and tackle the opposite and a snow wrestling "fight" would arouse - these were the best. I do not remember ever having this much fun in snow! There was snow in our faces - snow forced in our faces and rubbed in our faces; minor scrapes, bumps and bruises but nothing serious enough to prevent any of us from backing down on the "attacks".    Bryce even pushed Janette off of a little foot-high bridge into a shallow creek. But that was all part of the game.  I got flipped flat onto my back (several foot drop onto my back) after I attempted to attack Bryce. As I jumped on him from behind and shoved snow in his face, he pulled me over his head and dropped me on the ground. However, I pulled him over with me - it was worth it.

That night Bryce and Heidi prepared grilled burgers for dinner. We then proceeded to watch one session - of five sessions - of a Conference that was from earlier last early in Oklahoma (Have you ever heard of Buffalo Bill - he is the pastor at this church).   By then it was around 10:00 pm, so we stayed up till around Midnight playing games and such. I played some Egyptian Rat Slap (ERS),  Euchre, and some other card games.

The next morning, I was part of the breakfast team. We were suppose to try to have breakfast ready by 9:00 am, so we started around 8:30 am since we only had to make scrambled eggs, sausages, toast, and cereal. Well, the sausages turned out to take longer than we had expected, and breakfast was served around 9:30.  After breakfast and clean up, we sat down and watched the next two sessions of the conference and talked about them after watching each one.  By that time it was 1:00-2:00pm and no one was hungry, so we decided to just skip lunch.  We weren't for sure what to do with the $50 of food we had purchased for lunch but that all worked out later.

We were then allowed to go out side and we shoveled the drives and then were given some free time outside. We played around int he huge snow piles on the sides of the road left from the snow plow. Then everyone when out back to play. Though I stayed out front. I was working on a 4-5 foot high mound of snow, digging out a snow igloo.  I have wanted to do this for years, yet have not had the snow to do so. I use to love doing this as a kid, and I still do!  A friendly couple walked by as I was digging it out and said something along the lines of, "we use to do that when we were kids, I loved doing that to."   I then went out back and joined in the snow "fighting".  Sooo fun!

We came in then and watched the remaining two sessions of the conference, and then the supper crew made their taco wraps for us.  We had heard that another 1-3+ feet of snow was on the way (additional to the nearly 2 feet we had already got), and we were very hopeful we would get snowed in.  As you can tell, we did get snowed in - we were suppose to of arrived back at the church by 9:00pm Monday night. We actually arrived a the church around 2:00pm Tuesday afternoon.  Monday evening we stayed up agin playing games. Half the people went out on a walk in the snow, while the rest of us played Coup. Coup is a card-ish game kind of like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, but a lot simpler, easier, and shorter.  It's a fun game.

Tuesday morning for breakfast, we had Monday's lunch that we had skipped, grilled cheese (God sure dose provide). We then split into three groups again, one for shoveling the cars out, one for parking the bags and stuff into the cars, and the third for cleaning the cottage. I was thankful to be on the shoveling. I can really enjoy shoveling, especially with friends and in a ton of snow. We had to shovel both our drive and the neighbors drive partway since there was a vehicle in each.  We made it out okay and had a bit of slipping and sliding, but we made it home safely and we all had a ton of fun!!!


Here are few pictures that Bryce took.  I hope to have a few more, but since I took them with a film camera it will take a few weeks for them to be developed.