We picked up Wolfie from storage and it bumped right off the hitch!
He said
While planning continues to get down to the nitty-gritty for the cruise, this week we got to turn our attention to the thoughts of other vacation plans — ones that involve camping! With April arriving and the notion that spring may have finally ushered away winter, one of the items on this week’s agenda was to retrieve Wolfie from her winter hibernation spot. Knowing that Saturday was a day off together as a family, we made plans to have Wolfie sprung from her winter home. And as luck would have it, that ended up being the day a last ditch effort of winter came blasting through London. There we were loading up the trailer in bitter winds, getting soaked and cold — it felt like we should have been packing the trailer up for the winter rather than retrieving her!
Once we got loaded up, and I got some feeling back in my hands we were on our way back home. On the way back home Danielle asked if the trailer seemed to be making more noise than normal to which I assured her it wasn’t, reminding her that every year the first trip with Wolfie latched seems noisier than we remember. That was true until about three quarters of the way home after some louder than I was even prepared for clunks and a check of the rearview mirror revealed that the trailer had become completely unlatched and we were indeed finding out what the purpose of the safety chains! Oddly enough, with zero panic in Danielle or I, we were off the city street and into a TD Canada Trust parking lot to take stock of the situation relatively freakout free.
Once I found a safe enough spot to land I put on the four-way hazards and got out of the car prepared to see the worst as we approached the back end of the truck. With the trailer getting yanked around by two chains and the tongue free to potentially slam into the back of the truck was expecting to see some damage when we got to the back end. Miraculously the only damage really was some scraping to the under side of the trailer frame, and to the safety chains themselves! Nothing happened to the back end of truck, nor the trailer tongue.
After that huge sigh of relief, I began for the second time in that day, in a snow storm to latch the trailer to the truck. Once I got the hitch elevated off the ground I knew exactly why it happened — the lever the locks the tongue into place on the ball hitch, I had completely forgotten to clamp down, much less put the padlock on to lock it into place! In my haste to get it latched the first time in the freezing cold without gloves, I had missed that crucial step. Thankfully, this one jarring lesson came in the city, driving under the city speed limit and resulted in very little damage at all. The prospect of this happening on the highway, at those speeds, was a very sobering afterthought. By the time we got Wofie home I was ready to just relax and unwind for the night.
We’re going to need to find a friend or person who’s good at welding so we can get new safety chains on to replace the ones that almost were ground off on the road. And we’ll need to check her underside for certain once the weather is nicer to get underneath. But, otherwise Wolfie’s little unplanned adventure left no other immediate fixes for the camping season. So all that is left is to start to finalize, map out and ready Wolfie for this camping season!
The only downside to all of this is that the festival for which she got her name from, Wolfe Island Music Festival, was announced in the last week that is taking a one-year hiatus to do some restructuring, and reorganizing in order to continue to be feasible in the future. While we knew of this for some time, the official news was a hard pill to swallow. It means our trip to Bon Echo this year won’t start with our beloved festival, but it also means we can add another festival like Sandbanks Music Festival back into the itinerary!
With that scare with Wolfie behind us, she in the driveway, and the cruise officially almost a month away there is plenty to be happy about in this house, this week. Almost enough to make us forget this blasted winter that keeps trying to come back!
She said
The big news this week was bringing Wolfie home from winter storage, and yes with far more excitement than we have ever had before or intend on ever having again. But she is happily home and we are planning the events for the summer and fall so we can make the most out of our favourite little egg.
For me this week was about survival. By the time Monday rolled around I was at the start of pretty bad cold. This winter, the community has been hit with one of the worse illness rates that I can remember. Children in daycares and schools are being hit with some terrible viruses and so are the adults around them. John, Emelia and I had managed to avoid all the viruses and have a pretty healthy winter. This was my first real illness all winter, so I cannot really complain. I was congested, coughing and really struggling to get some good sleeps, but in the end it was just a cold. But after a couple nights of not great sleeps, I broke out the medication regiment and took the cold head on. I was finally getting to sleep and am happy to say that today I am finally feeling like I am on the healthier side of this thing. All in all it wasn’t horrible but I am happy to say that I am finally getting better.
As a bit of a distraction from feeling like a pile of crap this week I went back to focusing on our upcoming trip. We have been researching the ports we are going to and debated on excursions but have decided to just enjoy the ports for what they are and just explore on our own with the family. John and I brought out the DVD we had sent to us back before the trip three years ago to watch and build the excitement.
The other fun thing we have been working on is the story we are telling Emelia about our upcoming trip. As we have said we have told Emelia nothing about the vacation, she doesn’t know about the cruise and we have managed for a year to keep it that way. But we were trying to figure out how to tell her and have decided we are waiting until the last possible second to tell her where we are going. So we have decided we are going to tell her in the airport terminal as we arrive.
So we have started laying the groundwork as to why we are packing bags and why we are going to Toronto. So she thinks there is a chance that I am going to take a couple days off work and that John has a business trip in Toronto that we are going to stay with him. She is so excited even about that, the idea we are taking her out of school so she can play hookie with mommy while daddy works. To see her excitement over just the idea of that I cannot wait to see her face when we tell her the truth! She is going to LOOSE IT! And yes for our family who has been asking, yes we are recording it and yes we will be posting her reaction.
With that excitement and the recent snow on the ground we are really on the countdown to the big day. Just one month and four days until our cruise – in case you were wondering!