Dispatches from Dufferin Street

Matt and Leo

Originally uploaded by karchibald1

We had a glorious holiday – 12 days on the road – a weekend at our favourite music festival in our fabulous new tent, then nine relaxed beach days at the cottage. It was all any of us could have hoped for in a holiday.

The music festival was perfection – nice sunny days, great music, lovely people. The kids ran around, swam and biked all day, and fell asleep in our arms in front of live music every night; it was my version of heaven.

Our gigantic tent was the talk of the campsite (“look, honey, their tent has a BREEZEWAY!!”) – you can click through to a full photo set on our flickr account.

We opted against a late night drive to the cottage and spent the night in London at a cheap hotel, which saved some harrowing hours on strange roads in the dark, and provided an adventure in and of itself. Woke up and hit the road bright and early Monday morning and made the cottage by lunchtime.

We moved right into our strict regime of triathlon training followed by cold beer, Doritos, and napping. The kids and Matt spent a ton of time in the (wavy) water on the inner tube, we roamed the beach in search of rocks and waterglass, and ate from the charcoal BBQ every night. Leo discovered a crazy passion for fresh corn on the cob, Max became a super-star two-wheel bike rider, and Matt and I logged many kilometres on bikes, feet and in the water.

Paul, Tracey and Hazel found a silver lining to Toronto life – they can drive up to our cottage! We had a great weekend visit, the kids frolicked, we drank more beer, ate more Doritos, played board games… Dreamy.

David and Marta joined us for our last night, and we had a super campfire and fireworks display – a great end to a great week.

We took a long, but beautiful route home to avoid the 401 and Toronto, and pulled in around 11 p.m. on Tuesday, the 25th.

It was a truly perfect holiday, and wonderful to arrive home, too, and settle into our beds and lives here again.