Yup, you read that title right, I’m in Northern Wales! Specifically, right this moment I am in Holyhead sitting on my bed in a nice little B&B about to go to sleep. Wales is like a little slice of calm and happiness and I’m quite enjoying my adventure. 🙂
I had intended to write a post at the end of every day while on vacation and share my trip with you but a severe lack of wifi impeded that lovely intention. Hey, I’m staying in little towns, whatcha gonna do? Lol
I can’t wait to get some of my pictures up on here so you can see what I’ve been getting up to!…buuuut that won’t be tonight as I have to get up at 7am to go coasteering (so so so excited!) and I don’t wanna wait up the unknown amount of time it will take to get my pictures from my memory card to my iPad to my Dropbox to here lol oy! So many steps! lol
But trust me, they’ll be up soon and it won’t take long before you’re sick of my writing about Wales lol 😛
Stay tuned to hear, well…read, about my adventure, I think you’ll enjoy it! 😀
This past weekend (July 5-6) was the Nanaimo Dragon Boat Festival. Last season there was drama! drama! drama! And since you probably don’t memorize my blog posts if you would like to refresh yourself on what happened click here.
We had a goal, win a medal to redeem ourselves from last year.
Well…we didn’t quite make that goal a reality. We did redeem ourselves by having a strong presence at the festival, by racing hard, by having new jerseys the other teams were envious of and by moving up a division to the highest division at the festival, yup, that’s right, highest division! Awesomeness! The only part of our plan that didn’t quite come to fruition was the whole winning a medal thing but hey, we tried and we were close and having close times with the teams we were racing against, teams that consistently rank in the highest division, well, that is nothing to sneeze at.
Overall we ended up ranking 8th place out of 80 teams, not so bad, right?
My team The Twisted Hips
The people there are still the friendliest people ever, it is a beautiful location for a dragon boat festival, the water is warm and clean, even with the rain the temperatures are still high. There are so many great things associated with this festival! 🙂
Overall the weekend rocked, we all got there Friday night, I didn’t get motion sickness while on the ferry going over to the island (yay!), the three teammates I was bunking with were hilarious, the food was tasty, there was lots of walking and racing and just in general physical activity. There was free paddle boarding both days, two of my teammates and I gave that a try on the Saturday. It was ok, I was paranoid about falling in to water while wearing my racing clothes so I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I might have if I didn’t have the worry of spending the rest of my day in soaking wet clothes lol Having said that, even if I had been in a swimsuit and not worried about getting wet I don’t think it’s an activity I’d do for an extended period of time, it’s not that interesting lol 😛 There were all kinds of food trucks but our team pools money and we have a little buffet of food at our tent (as do most teams) so I didn’t get anything from the food trucks, I did hit up Tim Horton’s for tea multiple times but tea is a whole different story, I can’t survive without tea lol
There were also lots of booths set up with people selling everything from home made jewellery, to official festival clothing, to dragon boat gear to scarves…the list goes on and on. There are also booths set up to educate people on things like drinking tap water or recycling as well as booths representing banks and other boring things lol.
I bought two bracelets as thank you gifts for the daughters of my friend, they came and checked on my cat while I was gone and I thought they’d get a kick out of some jewellery, shrug. I also bought myself a festival t-shirt. I buy a shirt not from every festival but from a lot of them, I like having a memento that is also functional lol
One of my teammates and I are taking part in a plank challenge, on the Saturday we decided to plank while in the middle of partying (cause isn’t that how everyone planks? lol) and the teammates that were present decided to get in on the action lol Planking is now a team sport!
The plank challenge!
Even though it was slightly overcast most of the time, and raining for chunks of both days I managed to get sunburned, a special talent of mine lol Oh, and I also managed to get injured, another special talent of mine lol
While planking someone leaned on me and somehow I ended up hurting my lower back, I don’t mean a twinge I mean I was in massive pain and had trouble standing up straight. Luckily one of my roomies has a mothering instinct and she helped me out, she got me a microwavable gel pack thing from the hotel office and walked me through some yoga that she thought might help the back get better. A combination of some sort of cream a friend had, plus pain pills, plus yoga, plus the heating pack led to me being ok to race on the Sunday. To be honest, it wouldn’t have mattered what level of pain I was in on the Sunday I would have still raced but it was nice to race and not be thinking I was screwing my back up even more lol 😛
The other injury is just stupid *rolls eyes* when I was paddle boarding sand got in my shoes, didn’t matter how much I rinsed them out some sand stayed in them and while I could feel the sand rubbing against my feet it didn’t seem like that big of a deal, I was wrong. By Sunday I had 5 open and quite nasty wounds on my feet, ugh. Couldn’t do much about them till I got home and really all I could do once home was wash the feet, put some polysporin on the wounds and wrap with bandaids. The feet are healing well, slower than I would like but meh, whatcha gonna do? I wash, reapply the polysporin and bandaids daily and am basically waiting for them to finish getting better. I’m down to three bandaids instead of five now so that’s a nice improvement! 🙂
The trip home went smoothly, once again I managed to not get sea sick on the ferry, this is a big deal for me in case you were wondering lol I had an unpleasant surprise waiting for me though, a spider apparently decided the best place ever to have her eggs mature was in my bathroom, ick! ick! ick! I came home to this…
Baby spiders. Lots of baby spiders. *shudder*
I went on the offensive asap, obviously, and became a mass murderer. Thought the situation was taken care of but the next day when I got home from work I had a smaller web with fewer inhabitants in the exact same spot. wtf?? So they died also. I then sprayed the entire area with Mr. Clean all surfaces cleaner, and I don’t mean a gentle spray, I mean I drenched the area, it was dripping off the ceiling! Chemical warfare at its finest lol Since then I’ve seen an occasional baby spider but no big webs and en masse gatherings so I’m hoping they have moved on or died. 😛
Ah yes, it’s that time of year again, that one day in the year where we show our Canadian pride by waving flags, wearing red and white and watching fireworks. How is watching fireworks patriotic? I have no idea, it’s just somehow become associated with Canada Day, shrug. They aren’t even red and white fireworks, or shaped like a maple leaf or sponsored by Tim Horton’s so really, how patriotic can they be? 😉
That’s one big flag!
I had planned to go hiking today, get out there, enjoy the beautiful summer weather, be one with nature an all that but I am still coughing (been coughing for over a week now, lame!) and oddly enough I had no desire to have a huge coughing fit in the middle of some trail on the side of a mountain, I know, I’m so weird *rolls eyes*. Instead I slept in, cuddled with the cat, read a bit, watched some tv and then went to go hang with KL.
The first part of my day may seem lame, although I enjoy staying at home doing whatever but just so you don’t think I’m a hermit or anything I’ll tell you about the social part of my day. 🙂
KL and I made dinner at her place, I love her place, it’s so cute! I had this brilliant idea that we should do burgers and some sort of side dish, maybe even bbq it…it seemed like the perfect summer dinner idea. However, the lack of a bbq was an issue, though not as large of an issue as you might expect since I’ve never actually cooked on one and would probably have killed the burger patties lol Instead we cooked them in a frying pan, well technically I cooked them, yup, that’s right, I cooked. Me. The one who sucks at cooking actually cooked. Oh and get this, not only did I cook the burgers I also made them, from scratch! Anybody fall down from the shock of reading that? Oh wait, you’re already seated cause you’re reading my blog so phew, you are all safe! 😉
It is a dead easy burger recipe but one I very much enjoy. Each patty is 4oz of lean ground turkey meat, 2 tblsp salsa, 2 tblsp diced red onion. That’s it. No, I’m not kidding, that really is all you need. The amount of turkey I bought was enough to make three patties so I just tripled the amount of salsa and red onion and voila! I had these…
home made turkey burgers
Three oh-so-lovely but omg-icky-I-touched-raw-meat turkey burgers. The salsa adds flavour and moisture, the red onion helps the patties to bind. Once cooked the burger is moist and yummy. You have to be careful to not overcook them, after they have been flipped you can tell when you need to stop cooking them because a bunch of moisture starts releasing in to the pan, seriously, it is like the burgers are leaking or something, it’s weird lol, take em off the heat then and they will be perfect-o! 🙂
Normally I eat them with the normal everyday burger toppings but I had an inspired idea (don’t ya love how I’m tooting my own horn over here? lol 😉 ) and topped them with goat cheese and diced jalapenos. Mmm! Mmm! Mmm! Well, if you like goat cheese and jalapenos it’s a good idea lol We also used the more normal toppings, garlic mayo, ketchup, relish, mustard, lettuce, sauteed mushrooms and sliced tomato. The burgers were messy, as a good burger should be, but really tasty. KL, who is an amazing cook, really liked them so yay! I cooked something, for someone else and not only did I not food poison us or screw up the recipe but they really liked it! *happy dance*
KL’s contribution was a super delish salad! It had, hmm, lemme see if I can remember, spinach, apple, blackberries, poppyseed, home made dressing, sunflower seeds um, shoot…I can’t remember the rest. Oh, and so you don’t skip over what I wrote there, she made the dressing, from scratch! I’ve never even thought of doing that and she did it amazingly well! After her hard work the end result looked like…
KL’s amazing salad
Look at that! Not only delish but beautiful too. That picture is before the home made dressing was put on – in case you were wondering lol
So the end result of dinner looked like…
A tasty dinner. 🙂
Not only tasty, and pleasing to the eye buuuuut healthy too! Yay! 😀 Always nice when you can make a healthy dinner also taste good lol
After dinner we went to watch the fireworks. There was a live concert and during the earlier part of the day there had been all kinds of things going on but being the people that we are we waited to go until later in the night so we could avoid all the little kids and families lol. The band we were near was actually really good, they were doing covers of all different sorts of music, people in the crowd were dancing, the band was funny between songs, overall a good choice by whomever picked them.
The fireworks show lasted a half hour, started at 10:30pm. It was kinda funny, KL and I had a great seat, on a log on the beach, it was still warm, you could hear (and see) the water lapping up against the sand, see people standing on the pier to our right, see the bridge to our left, it was really quite a beautiful night. So, this great atmosphere is happening and right on time to our left the fireworks start, then boom! To our right more fireworks start. Turns out we were between two different fireworks displays so everyone for the first little bit was turning their heads quickly from side to side trying to watch both shows and not miss anything – the crowd must have looked like one of those cat videos on youtube…
After about five minutes or so, yes, it took that long! the realization dawned that both shows are identical, yup, identical. So really you only had to pick which one you wanted to look at, or really, which direction was most comfortable for your neck, and you were set. The fireworks were pretty, and I would show you pictures but all my pictures of them suck, they either look like this…
that little red blob is what was actually a big beautiful firework, I swear!
or this…
again, looked waaaay better in real life, honest!
I don’t know why my pictures of fireworks never work, sigh, guess you’ll have to take my word they were good but you can do that, right? 😉
After the fireworks I came home and watched the movie Crazy Stupid Love and am now crushing a bit on Ryan Gosling. He looked yummier than my dinner lol 😉
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 