On Thursday night, Maureen and John paid me a visit for the weekend which was excellent. They were on a whirlwind tour of Ontario and had just left Troy and Connie’s place that afternoon, stopped into Mississauga to go to the Playdium and then headed to our place. It was a long day of driving and when they arrived around 10:30 that night, they looked pretty haggard. A few pints were drank but nothing crazy happened as they were beat.
The next morning it was raining (no surprise there this summer!) so we headed out to T-Basil for some thai/vietnamese food (they wanted to explore all ethnic food options available to them!) and then headed to the Museum of Nature to check out some dinosaurs!
I have never in my life been to the Museum of Nature. I got close one year when Eric was visiting from Kingston and we decided to walk down to it on a cold winter’s day only to find out it was closed. So we were all looking forward to checking out the dinosaurs.
We were not disappointed. For $5 we gained access to a land of dinosaur bones. Alas, there were no T-Rexes but there was this huge turtle (probably the size of my living room) hanging from the ceiling. I had visions of prehistoric travel on the backs of these turtles! I shall have some pictures off of my sister as we took a few that day! Especially around a picture of a T-Rex with a hard hat on him. Hilarious!
The next level of the museum had the mammal area. The coolest factoid I found was that of the wolf…because there are long periods of time that they may not find food, there systems are used to eating up to 20% of its own body weight. In comparison to us, that’s about 160 hamburgers in one sitting! That was incredible.
The next level was the exhibition level. They had some asteroid exhibition geared for kids and also a photography exhibit. That was pretty neat.
The final level was the bird level. Birds don’t interested me all that much so we didn’t spend that much time in there.
All in all, we were done the entire museum in two hours which is fine by me. The dinosaurs were well worth the admission price and I’m glad that we went.
A funny event happened when I was standing next to a T-Rex statue and there was this kid trying to reach up and grab it’s teeth but couldn’t quite make it. So I picked the kid and realized he was quite heavy and then put him down. John and Maureen were wondering what the heck I was doing picking up some random kid and in hindsight, I suppose this world we live in doesn’t allow for gentlemen to help a kid touch a dinosaur’s teeth. I’m just glad that no harm was done (aka some parent freaking on me!).
We then headed home to relax for awhile and play with John’s new remote control helicopter. Vero came over and we had a good supper and then invited Simon, Emily and Eric over for a few drinks. We even broke out the bottle of Grappa that Vero brought up from Italy! It was quite horrible!
That night we headed out to Mike and Melissa’s stag party out in Kanata. Vero graciously offered to drive us and we took Simon and Emily’s rented SUV which would hold six of us a lot better! Unfortunately for Vero, there were torrential downpours along the way (to the point where we found out more than 500 houses were flooded over the night and some streets were closed down!) but we managed to finally make it all the way out to Kanata from Orleans through this madness and got to the Legion.
When we arrived, I must admit that we were surprised to see that not one of our friends showed up. Wait, Collin and Becky were there but had to leave shortly after we arrived. I suppose that during the summer, it is hard to make plans with people as they are all on vacation.
We found ourselves a nice table and grabbed a few cheap Legion beers (interesting to note that the same sugar taste out of the taps in the Legion in Kapuskasing is also in the Kanata taps. Must have something to do with the buildup in the lines?) and chatted with a few people I knew. It was good to see some familiar faces such as the Valenti clan, Ken and his wife (expecting a second child!) as well as Scotty.
There were some hilarious games going on including one where they asked for partners to come up and as soon as I was right behind Vero, she managed to grab some old guy instead of me as her partner! What the heck? I felt denied in a way no man has been denied before. More beer was needed.
I did end up winning the 50/50 draw and Vero got the chance to throw a pie in Melissa’s face. There was also this great feast that we devoured at the end of the night. In fact, I think it was quite silly of John and I deciding to go to Marroush after that for a schwarma as I could only eat half of mine. John did love seeing the Schwarma Nazi though and that made his weekend I believe.
Good times were had and I’m glad that everyone had a great precursor to Mike and Melissa’s wedding!
The next day we meandered around the house and eventually headed downtown to the market to meet up with some of John and Maureen’s friends. It was a nice day out and we made our way through some shops. I ended up in the meat market where I bought this excellent jar of jerk sauce. It’s a shame that I managed to drop it on the floor at Ma Cuisine and it shattered all over the place! Argh!
After some munchies at the Heart and Crown, we returned home for the night and watched an excellent mini-series called Dead Set (recommended by Benoit). It revolves around the behind the scenes of the British ‘Big Brother’ TV show but while this is being filmed…woops, zombies attack and the Big Brother complex may very well be the safest place in town. It was quite an awesome display of zombie carnage…it reminded me of 28 Days Later in that the zombies were quite fast moving (which I’m totally fine with!). I highly recommend this mini-series and it should run about two hours in total viewing time.
All in all, a successful weekend with John and Maureen was had. I think they appreciated having some low key time at my house at the end of their vacation as they had been on high gear for the week prior! They are definitely welcome any time in the future and perhaps we can check out the Palladium (which we found out was also in Ottawa!)