poplar road

We've just come home from an extended long weekend at our friends' beachfront property near Port Townsend in Washington. This was our third time at the Lund's annual gathering to celebrate the Fourth of July, and as usual, it was a great mix of people, great food including a fresh seafood boil with local crab and clams, and lots of rest and relaxation. Just what we needed.

Richard and I started the weekend with a Canada Day quiz on Friday night, giving out packages of Canada-coloured Smarties as prizes. That spawned a funny conversation in which I sang the Smarties song - turns out they don't have chocolate covered Smarties in the States, their "smarties" are compressed sugar things. Our American friends get a lot of amusement out of Canadian jokes at our expense, so this was our way of educating them a little on this great land of ours. (Last year our response was to play the Song of 1812, which didn't go over well at all.) And we were very happy to see our friend Lisa, an ex-patriated Canadian who could translate for us. For example, as we were sharing the latest plans for our home reno, I got blank looks while explaining the changes to our "ensuite". Master bath, I was corrected. At one point I had enough of my badminton birdie landing "OOOT", and suggested we buy young Dallas a one-way ticket to backwoods Ontario so he could see how long he lasted teasing the Canadians who actually do talk like that. Hmph.

We all got sunburns in odd spots - tops of knees, noses, one foot - and spent equal amounts of time buried in sweatshirts and fleece blankets around the fire, but it was near-perfect weather for eating, gabbing, reading, badminton, sleeping, and eating some more. There's always great food at these weekends, since each couple is assigned a meal to orchestrate and each one lasts several hours it seems. We brought our chafing dishes and Richard's gigantic stock pots again this year and they were put to good use. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. Ideas for next year include an Iron Chef weekend - all the guests supply the food and Richard and John, another capable and avid cook, will each do a dinner extravaganza. But they had so much fun making chowder together out of the leftover seafood boil that I think they'd rather cook together the whole weekend than make a competition out of it. And how could people so sleepily satiated from morning to night judge anything anyway? And it's hard to keep Richard out of a kitchen.

Many thanks to Tim and Debbie and family for hosting another great getaway - we're looking forward to next year, and to having you up for a visit here. Cheers.