What I Am Thankful For

This Thanksgiving, Jeff and I were afforded the opportunity to spend the holiday in Whistler, Canada with Matt and Melissa. The drive was fantastic, the weather superb, the Grandparents that agreed to watch four crazy boys were a Godsend...but what I am most thankful for is the fact that I did not need a knee replacement surgery after Matt pulled the stunt in the video below.

Background commentary: Super sweet little sister offers to go down the mountain a little way and video big brother. Mean Big Brother decides to spray little sister with snow. Big Brother can no longer hockey stop like the good ole days.

If I had more time, I would write about how the four of us turned everything into a song (them chickens jackin' my style!) or how I learned on this trip that Melissa misuses air quotes and gets overly anxious around US Customs Officials (so much so that she can't remember how we were related to her when asked, so from now on we will forever be her cousins).

I would write about the sudden fear of heights I developed on the "gi-norvous" peak-to-peak gondola (three miles long, 1400 feet in the air...that's aboot 4.8 kilometers long, 420 meters in the air in Canadian speak, eh). I would write about how this fear was compounded when we were on a gondola with a few locals and they felt it was an appropriate time to share the unfortunate accident just last year when a gondola fell to the ground.

If I wasn't busy trying to organize my calendar so that I don't miss Room 17's Christmas party (like I did the Thanksgiving lunch), I would write about how glad we were that we got a very good deal on the trip since our ski-in / ski-out condo turned in to a walk-very-very-far-in / very-far-out condo due to the lack of groomed trails.

I would write of the fabulous dinner we enjoyed celebrating Mel's birthday which included a melt-in-your-mouth-fillet, port wine, and date pudding (who knew date pudding was so shockingly good). Or of the night we polished off not one, not two, but three chocolate covered apples. Or that time how we worked as a team in the Vancouver airport to devour a monstrous Cinnabon. Okay, two.

Really, if I didn't have 400 loads of dirty ski laundry, I would write more about the night we sat in a luke warm hot tub for like fifteen minutes before any of us piped up and said something, or about the other time our hot tub experience was ruined by a loud and obnoxious man who wanted to tell us about the "key to happiness" and all the properties he owned across the globe.

Even though I couldn't find a single set of Olympic rings to pose next to, and it seems that no one in Canada has a computer system that can link to prior reservations, (not even my super-organized-travel-binder could help us), I learned that all you really need for a successful ski trip is hot chocolate combined with peppermint schnapps, a fire place, and a hot tub. No bad all-you-can-eat sushi or car rental guy trying to upsell "snow tires" can take that away.

But it is back to life...back to reality (that is where Matt & Mel will probably start singing) so I won't go into detail about the super fun (and numerous!) adventures that the four boys had at Camp Cousins or how those (semi-) sweet boys greeted us with roses when we arrived back in the DFW airport.

Since I don't have time for all of that, I will just leave you with a gajillion pictures.