Feeling Guilty While At My Leisure

I don't know where April and May have disappeared to but I have been feeling guilty about not posting.  I have been so busy travelling and glamping ( glamping is glamorous-camping where you have a generator and hair curler etc.) and fishing and enjoying spring but have not had a lot of Internet connection.  We have some now (one bar) at this fishing camp where I take the grandson, Nolan, each Spring.  But we don't have a connection at the ranch.  The grand-daughter is coming on Sunday for her first attempt at glamping with Nanny and learning to fish.  I will throw in a few photos now and sign off as I have to do this while the generator is running, and have already spent an hour on catching up e-mails.  
Before we left Ashcroft at the start of April, I took my former student, who has a brain growth problem, to church.  She is 17 now and precious to me.
The folk loved her and she asked me to make her a prayer shawl in pink.  Which I did.  I also finished the last one for this year (see below)  and gave them over to a friend who gave all the 14 shawls we gathered to the Bishop to take to the Healing and Reconciliation Meetings with the First Nations.  Every Indian person who finds the bravery to tell their story of how the Residential School system damaged them and their families will be given a shawl that has had reconciliation prayers said over it.  

Then we left for the ranch. 

This sign is a clue that the driveway down to the ranch house is very close.  

While we were camped in at Lee Creek Ranch there were some days of storm and rain.  Here is our Shorty cleaning up the driveway after a windy day that broke whole trees and ripped our canopy on the RV again before we could get it in.  We just had it replaced last year.

   We settled in beside a corral and the machine shops and I raked the yard to make a more pleasant spot for us.  It is about a half mile from the main house so we have some privacy, and lovely mountain water.  That pile was hauled away to the ranch dump.  I hung hummingbird feeders and was greeted by about 20 of them before we left.  It is a chore just filling the feeders.

We stayed at the ranch for a month but had to move out down that horrendous mountain to set up camp closer to our own home about 3 hours east as this is the time for our yearly fishing camp experience with our grandson Nolan.  We were fortunate to be able to move in and set up camp in our favorite spot

 that has a bit more privacy from the road and where there is a cove that offers good fishing just off shore.  We had just setttled in for a week, went to pick up Nolan and came back to get the lines in the water as fast as we could before dark.  He had a bite immediately and then we landed one just at dark when the RCMP came down our camp road with lights flashing to tell us we had to evacuate due to a fire that had been burning for weeks but the wind was now blowing it our way.    I threw the fish in the fridge and we took off leaving chairs and mats etc behind.  We stayed in a friend's backyard that night and then went to another Provincial Park in the morning.  It rained and the firefighters decided to let us back in to our camp.  All of our left-behind belongings were still there.  The helicopters were sucking water up a long hose from the lake to transport to the hot spots.

Nolan was able to go for his 3 days of Horsemanship in the mornings though so he was happy.  He learned how to post when a horse trots.  

There is a lot to concentrate on, almost like learning to drive....keep your heels down, steer but not too sharply or long, balance, push up and down, elbows in, hands near withers, keep eyes forward and back straight etc etc.  

Then we would go for a soft ice cream before heading back to camp.  We had a Scottish fellow, Bill McInnes, from Oban camping beside us.  He was taking a break from 'counselling fatigue' but still seemed to be on the cell phone a lot.  He was very humourous and got on well with Nolan.  

Now I will say goodnight but also feel badly when I look at all the pictures from the last few months, because I have shared so little with you.  Some humorous things have happened just about every day.  Maybe I can write about them next winter when we are trapped inside during a blizzard.