she'll be comin' 'round the mountain

After a surprisingly restful in-the-car-on-the-side-of-the-highway sleep, we drive the remaining hour to Hinton, Alberta. Our final destination! As soon as we got to Tanya and Jason's we began exploring!


Here's our little Hobbit hole in the cabin.




Here's Tanya and Jason's back yard!



Here's the woods behind Tanya and Jason's cabin.


Here's the field where we picked wild strawberries. They were everywhere!


Here we are doing a variation of "the happy couple portrait" on a hang gliding launch pad.


Here's Shane's cousin, Kyle, in front of the cabin. He dropped by for the festivities!

We went to the visitor centre that Tanya works at. She runs a little gift shop at Kelly's Bathtub. Apparently this lake is named after this dirty old miner from the 1800s that fell in while fishing. They started referring to the lake as "Kelly's bathtub", the name stuck and the rest is history!


Here's Shane comparing dental work with his new friend the grizzly bear.


Here I am holding hands with a fellow cougar.


Here's Kelly's Bathtub!


That water was pretty irresistible. We made like Kelly, and had a bath. The water was pretty cold, so our swimming session didn't last too long before our limbs started to go numb!

After our quick dip, we dried off and headed for a bigger lake to do some canoeing!


Here we are racing. It was pretty much three against one the whole time. Shane let Jason do all the work and he beat us by a mile... or two. Seriously. That man can paddle!


Here's the bounty of our fishing attempts. Shane caught the biggest one. Catch and release!


Here we are making our way through a twisting maze of reeds. This river was carved out by some busy beavers. We had to portage (and I use that in the loosest way possible, as the dam was all of ten inches wide) over a beaver dam at one point.


Here's Jason and Shane gaining on us. They totally just pushed past us! It was crazy! These paths were pretty narrow... I don't know how they managed to push us aside!

After canoeing across the lake and down the beaver river and back again, we were pretty pooped. We headed back to the cabin and had ourselves some barbecue steak (mmmmeat) and potatoes, and the most delicious salad with home grown greens from the garden and those wild strawberries that we picked in the afternoon.

We did a little star gazing through some crazy high powered binoculars after dinner. What a treat! Light pollution is the pits! I miss seeing stars in the sky at night.


Here's the full moon in all its glory!


Here's Jupiter. Through the binoculars we could see its five moons! My camera could not capture them though. You'll just have to believe me. It was nerdtastic! We stayed up chatting for a bit before crawling up to our Hobbit hole for the best sleep ever!