Trip to McCall

We decided a while ago that we wanted to go to McCall's Winter Carnival this year. We invited some friends and family and finally hooked my parents (Oma and Opa). I think they were going through some Nathan and Sarah withdrawals after not having seen them over the holidays and not since early November. Needless to say, we were very happy to have them join us. We drove up Thursday afternoon with near perfect road conditions. We got to the Farmer Cabin about an hour before my parents but found that the cabin's heat was not on. We turned the heat on and got unpacked and tried to stay warm while we awaited Oma and Opa's arrival. We soon found out that we didn't have any running water and were concerned that maybe the pipes were frozen. When Oma and Opa showed up we learned how to actually turn on the water to the cabin and were able to get running water in the house. However, we also discovered that it sounded like there might be a burst pipe or something under the house because when we turned off the faucets we could still here a mysterious running/gushing water sound. We phoned some of my Uncles (Jim, Warren and Rick) to get some support but were concerned that this wasn't something we could fix or diagnose this evening and we needed to stay in a place with running water. My Uncles Jim and Warren and my Aunt Peggy offered for us to stay at their cabin, so after we finished eating dinner we headed over there. We stayed at their cabin for the rest of our stay at McCall and enjoyed their company while they were all there for part of the time. Thanks so much Jim, Peggy and Warren for your typical hospitality, kindness, warmth, space, conversation, sleds, and beds!


Here are Sarah and Nathan enjoying bedtime rituals with their Oma and Opa on Thursday night at Jim, Peggy, and Warren's cabin. I think all were content with their individual roles (including Mary and I!)

The kids enjoyed spending time with their grandparents and vice-versa and we all just enjoyed being in such a beautiful place together. When the kids slept (and sometimes when they didn't) I was pretty persistent in getting us together to play some games. We had purchased Alhambra, which is a new fun game that we learned about from some friends, and I was anxious to break ours in. Oma and Opa really liked the game and we played it a number of times. We also played Ticket to Ride: Europe. Mary had a disastrous gaming weekend, not winning a single game and generally getting wasted until we played Ticket to Ride: Switzerland (she absolutely dominates as this game!) on Sunday night and of course she won. I'm glad she won the game otherwise the trip home may not have been as pleasant as it was (tongue in cheek!).
Anyway, see below for the fun festivities of our long weekend with Oma and Opa in McCall for the Winter Carnival. I tried to do the posts so that they would be in order for your reading pleasure!

p.s.- this is a total binge-blog which is the result of cancelled church due to the amount of snow we got last night. It's snowed every day since we got home from McCall, but dumped a lot last night.