Work went Skiing.

Had our Sales awards in Fernie BC.

It snowed more than 3 feet in 48 hours while we were there. It was completely insane…

That is a Honda Odyssey Minivan with snow up to it’s door handles. I loved it. I forgot how much I liked snow. Actually, i forgot how much I liked LOTS of snow. It was good. I proved to myself that I (while still quite overweight) am in pretty good shape. I ski’d for 5 hours on Saturday in Knee deep powder on black diamond runs with no real issues. Just had a complete blast!

Other than that, I’ve been battling a sinus infection. not sure how the body produces so much snot. Family is good. The boy is awesome. Work is fine.

That is all. enjoy some pics.

Our travel day in photos…

We had an amazing weekend. We dropped Andrew off at his Nan’s house for a gramma fix (well. actually, we initially stopped there because i broke our house key in half trying to pry open a geocache and they had a spare for us. We thought that it sucked the the key broke until i mentioned to Traci that I could have been trying with the van key and we would have been stranded in Tilley Alberta. yikes)

Apparently Andrew was very sad at bedtime because he really missed his mom and dad. He went on and on about how much he missed us. He even told her that it was as much as he has missed us on a sleepover since he was three (he is 4.59 right now). I guess we had a pretty awesome weekend by the sounds of that.

You will all be happy to know that the sled is still in the lake this morning and no one drowned.

Probably cheap. Want it?

Not sure I want to know what happened.

RUSTY!!

Remember that Seinfeld? The one where Kramer bought a horse and carriage? Well, we got a bit of that today, but for the most part it was an enjoyable and odor free ride.



See my hand shadow?

We just hung around the park today. Andrew and I hiked across to Bald Butte and checked out the edge of the world together.




He got two special cobblestone rocks from the edge of the world. he likes them a lot!

We also went for a hike. This happened (as i transposed in Facebook)

We went for a little hike tonight. As we were walking along the lake we see two girls sledding down a hill that heads straight for the lake. There is a small berm just before and the girl comes sliding down, hits the berm and falls off the saucer sled. The sled continues down the bank and ends up rolling across a bit of ice and comes to rest floating in some open water 10 feet from shore.

The girl, without missing a beat starts to head out onto the ice.

Me: WOAH!! stop. Don't even think about going out there.
Her: dumb look.
Me: seriously, that is very thin ice, do not go out there!!
Her: dumb look
Me: listen, don't go out there ok? Say ok!
Her: dumb look.
Me: SAY OK!
Her: uh-huh.
Me: it's an incredibly cheap piece of plastic, after we leave, leave it there!

So we sort of spied on them for a bit to make sure they weren't that stupid but since it was getting dark out we headed back to the cabin, knowing we did all we could do and if they still tried to get the sled and drowned, there was probably no words of warning that would have stopped them from trying...

Anyway, no sirens tonight so all must be good!



He has completed probably the equivalent of a marathon in sledding distance up and down the hill this weekend too! He sleds to the bottom of his first run of the day, finds a chunk of hard snow, places it in the back of his sled and calls it his snow friend, while making me snow-sit his snow friend at the top of the hill on the sled trips that are known to be bumpy rides.


Oh yeah, when we were hiking on the woods earlier, we had to detour Around a fallen tree. Andrew was leading the way and just leaped down onto a frozen creek.

I looked at Traci and said "hmm, I wonder if the ice is safe, let's send the boy to check..." hehe.

Ok, that's it, we are planning an adventure back to Calgary tomorrow so I'm sure we'll have more stories to share.

Seeya!

Quite a day...

... That was right on the edge of good adventure and sheer stupidity.

I have known about the 'gap' road for some time and have always wanted to cross from the west block of Cypress Hills to the Core Area on this rustic road. More in a bit.

We wanted to go to Ft. Walsh today as we've never been and seeing we were not doing anything else, why not. Only a few Kms out of Maple Creek a s we see the sign and as we probably should have guessed, it was closed for the season. Since we've never been down this highway at all, we (i) decide we should go anyway.

After about a half hour we get to the entrance to the west block and by the looks of things the road is pretty snowy and it's all steep slopes and switchbacks. We (i) decide we should go anyway.

Traci is white knuckling the dash a bit as we slowly wind our way up the not very often used road, but we eventually make our way up to the top and to the area map sign showing where we are. We hang out a bit and then figure it's time to head back. But hmmm Ft. Walsh is just over the hill according to the map, but darnnit its closed. Hmmmm. so we (i) decide we should go anyway.



Even though it was closed, it was really worth the drive! It's an amazing spot, one worth a summer visit for sure! So after we finished up there we head back up the hill to the top. I am sort of scoping out the road conditions and thinking maybe today is the day that we take a run at the 'gap'. Afterall, we have a 4 year old, 2 pugs, very spotty cell service and a free minivan. What could go wrong? Nah. Let's not bother. Let's head back into town and just head to the cabin from there.



So we get back into the highway and we (i) decide we should take a look at the road when we get to it. It's a really rocky and narrow road skinned off the top layer of the bald prairie surroundings. But its frozen and dry. I debate in my head about the snow on the other side of the 'gap' but we (i) decide we should go anyway.



After about 20 minutes of good road and cattle gates, we start to see signs of more snow in the few protected areas. We slowly test the first big drift across the road and as I suspected it's hard as a rock. Over we go confidently ahead and actually enjoying the stark scenery.



Well. All that changed when we reached the edge of the core block of the hills. We were moving more up and down in some pretty steep terrain and finally we came to a spot that looked impassible.

It was. The snow drift was very deep and very rutted from the few other attempts to pass, so after a bit of a scouting walk to see if there was a way past, we turned around and headed back.

All was not lost tho as we found a Different road that probably saved us 40 minutes of backtracking. Yay for that. Thank you spotty cell service and google maps for that info!

Just another day on vacation with me and my bravado.



Not much else, Andrew spent a good 1.5 hours sledding, we built a fire ad had some marshmallows and pretty much just relaxed.


Tomorrow? Stay right here at the cabin and keep the adventures to a minimum me thinks...

*Most of these pics are re shot with my iPhone off the display on the back of my big camera. I'll do a photo blog next week sometime to show you the real look of this amazing place...

Rizzo fell in a well...

... but I rescued her. We were exploring the very cool 'former' town of Alderson, which is just a number of foundations and piles of old artifacts strewn about. The history of the town is interesting in its own right, but we'dve never heard about it if we hadn't been chasing a geocache.

Well, as we were hiking through the tall grass, Rizzo the pug dog finds herself on the edge of a deep hole and since she can't stop in time, she valiantly tries to leap over, only missing the far edge enough that she kind of dangled vertically for a monent. It was enough time for me to decide not to dive for her as there was a layer of snow about 4' down that I hoped would hold her. It did. I was able to lay down and reach down far enough to scoop her out.




We had a really nice drive down here. We found 3 out of 4 geocache attempts and took 6.5 hours for a 3.5 hour trip. We are all feeling fresh and ready to take on the trails and snow tomorrow.




Yeah, that's right! Snow! There wasn't any for the entire trip but about a km from the cabins all of a sudden there is PILES!


Tomorrow I think we will tour the Cypress Hills Winery and Fort Walsh. We have been coming here for 12 years and have never visited the fort.



We went so slow we ended up leapfrogging this same freight train 4 times. Got some really cool shots. I stole this one from the little screen on the back of my DSLR camera.





Seeya!

Things are feeling pretty ok around here…

It’s been above average in the world here. We have done a few things lately that we wouldn’t have in the recent past. Like park the car downtown on a Saturday and just walk around to see what we can see and do. This weekend we are off to Cypress Hills, Sk. It’s one of our favourite places in the world. We have a cabin booked and will spend the better part of the next 4 days just hiking and geocaching and relaxing. It’s the first time in a lot of years where I get to go with no extra burdens on my shoulders. Nice stuff indeed.

We still kinda keep a look out over our shoulder for negative stuff as it’s still all too fresh, but we have been letting ourselves enjoy free time and family time more and more. Andrew and I tend to hang out on a regular basis now. I hear this a lot: ‘Daddy, let’s have a sausage party tonight’. hehe, yeah. that’s my guy. On tonight's Sausage party I went to get him out of the back of the van and as I open the door I'm hit with a wall of stink. ‘Wow little dude, it stinks in here’ I say. He replies. ‘Yeah, it’s my toots Daddy, I’ve been tooting!’ and laughs like a goon.

I’m so proud!

I have been back to the gym for 3 weeks now, and along with my hour of semi personal training 3 days a week, i have been spending 20-30 minutes extra on the ol’ ‘mill, getting my running legs back under me. The puzzle pieces are coming back together. I was going to go to Pete’s TKO workouts, but honestly, I was afraid I would hurt myself. His stuff is very intense and a lot of it is partnering during the workout stations and I felt like I'd be letting a bunch of other people down. I am going to stick with my current plan at my current gym for the next 2 months. by then I'll be ready to take on Pete’s hour of power! He’s got a pretty good little core strengthening book for free on his website, with a really awesome nugget of info on nutrition. It’s basically what he eats. Simple. Nothing diet about it, just eat this stuff, and this much of this stuff and you’ll be good.

His new cool website is here…

That’s it. Off on an awesome roadtrip in the am!

If you want to tag along on the trip, feel free to follow on Instagram. I tend to post lots of ‘live’ pics there when we go away. I am @nzeller_evs on Instagram.

Here are some  more pics of our adventures lately.

This is the hill that we tried to climb down. It ended up way too icy and dangerous, so i did what every 38 year old overweight guy would do..

…I sat down on my ass on the ice, grabbed Andrew onto my lay and SLID all the way down to the bottom! Surprised the heck out of Andrew. He laughed all the way down the hill and for a half hour after. I may have been seen as a superhero at that moment… Was pretty awesome!

Seeya!

HEy.

Thanks for all your kind comments on the previous post. They are much appreciated and give us strength. The move is over. I would like to say it was a piece of cake, but it wasn’t. Not to diminish anyone else's shitty move stories, I have to say it really was an incredible hard few days. It was so cold out that day, that leaving the door open in our old house froze the water in the toilet tank in the washroom 18’ away from the door. this took only 3 hours of open door to do.

It’s been a couple weeks now and we are a lot better. We have a long way to go, but we are planning and living. Ever since we bought our first house 10 years ago, we truly haven't owned anything. As of a few days ago, we don’t owe a penny to anyone. anywhere.

It’s a good feeling. I’m not sure I understand it yet, but I am sure I will get used to the idea.

I have been writing all night, detailing the entire story of the last 7 years in all it’s awful truth, but I am not sure this is the place to publish it. I may someday, maybe soon. I’ll have to get clearance from the boss, as we have plenty of local readers, and there is a stigma… I get that but sometimes it can be a source of strength for people, to see that they are not alone in their struggles. that’s the reason i would post it, to show that we are human beings and we are fallible, but there are options and there is help.

I am running again, and I am back at my old gym too! 3 days a week, group trainer session. Feels good!

Take care. Goodnight.

by the way, this is what winter looks like here right now…