All Downhill From Here

Thursday morning I packed up Bessie and the kiddos and headed 2.5 hours East of Calgary to Linda’s prairie ranch for a visit. She and her husband welcomed us heartily with homemade pizza and we yacked away and got to know each other.

My kids played with her friendly border collie Shiloh and we went for a hike in the badlands not far from the river. The hike was fun, even if we didn’t find any dinosaur bones. My kids enjoyed climbing up the edges of the coulee from the bottom and later tossing rocks down from the top. I saw a little bush rabbit take off over one of the hills. We went out in Linda’s back yard to her turtle pool, but turtle was shy and I missed seeing her.

We stayed overnight and after a good breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast Linda and I got out for a little jog. Maybe if I’d gotten up earlier it wouldn’t have been so hot, but we got in 3 miles on her gravel road. I watched Shiloh chase away an antelope as it bounded away with ease. We chatted about running form and looked back at our footprints in the fresh gravel. There was a lovely breeze which sort of cooled us off.

After we packed up again we took Bessie out to meet Linda’s horses for her photo-op and headed over to meet Heather for lunch. She made us some yummy burgers and potato salad, and one of her boys whipped up a delicious chocolate peanut butter marshmallow square.

Soccer Boy snapped this pic from the trampoline.

Heather has quite a few different animals at her place, and the kids were especially taken with her litter of greyhound puppies.

Later, while the boys bounced on the trampoline, on which they’d turned the sprinkler (whee!), Little Runner fell in love with Heather’s tadpoles.

There were an abundance of them, so Heather fished 4 out of their fish tank and sent them home with us. They’re quite active, and we picked up some water conditioner and food for them on the way home.

We had plenty of good conversation at Heather’s, too. She showed us her new belly dancing coin sash and a few moves. Her sons were registering for a team roping competition. We talked about running and life, and when her hubby and his buddy came home I heard about showing horses and ranch stuff too. It was a fun visit – we’ll have to do it again sometime!

It was a hot drive home, as my air conditioning in the van conked out, so we took full advantage of finding convenience stores for Slurpee stops 🙂 Ah, I love summer!