God Provides

God has answered my and others prayers and I once again have my own wheels for getting around.

This is the last view from the van that was given to camp. The engine light went blink blink, the engine went clunk clunk and smoke came billowing out and engine went no more. 

This is my new set of wheels. It is a 1999 Dodge Darango. 

This vehicle has been given to me and then I will give it back to the person when I leave. They are basically loaning it to me but it is in my name. It can seat 8 which is good for if I end up transporting children in the fall and also has 4WD for when winter comes so that I will still be able to go places if it snows lots.

These last photos are from last Friday afternoon. I got to experience using horses to work cows. They seperated the cows and calves and then were roping the calves and then treating them. I learnt how to wrestle the calf and hold it down. It took 2 hours riding to move the cows to the new field. The flatness of the landscape still amazes me.

In case you are wondering I do do work at camp..... The past week and a half has been beautiful weather so I have spent a lot of my time outside doing jobs around the property. This weekend we hold a Gospel Music Festival so it is busy getting ready for that. I will be in the kitchen over the weekend helping with cooking for all the musicians and their families. I have done my 12th school visit at the high school. It is exciting to have already 26 campers registered for summer camp and we are praying for more campers and also leaders. I am now helping the summer programme director with things for summer camps such as games and crafts, one month till camps start.

May Long Weekend = Horses

In Canada Queens birthday is a long weekend in May. I am told that is always snows May long weekend. At the beginning of the week it seemed strange that it would snow as it was a lovely warm weather when we had the school group in. I even played a night game with the kids, had to wait till after 10 for it to even begin to get dark and I did not even have a jacket on.

But the snow did come, this was the view on Thursday and Friday morning out the lounge window at home. I am very thankful that the weather was warm again for the weekend.

 I have spent the weekend out at Cecil Lake learning about horses and doing lots of riding. The reason for this is so that I will be able to go on the Blueberry trails camp as a leader. It is our last camp for the summer and is a week long trails ride. We will ride each day then camp somewhere each night.

The first job for the weekend was to clear rubble and trees from the coral that the horse would be in. This definitely required gloves as there was still a bit of snow. The next job was to clean and treat my saddle and bridle.

This is me on Bandit at the end of Sundays riding. The couple who own him have said that I can use Bandit for the summer. So I will be looking after him at camp and then riding him for the trails ride. He is a tall horse. 16hand to the withers. (4inches in a hand and the withers are the shoulders)I can stand up straight under his chin.

 The above are pictures from our Sunday ride. It was four hours and there were 7 of us. In total I spent about 10 hours in the saddle over the weekend. Surprisingly I am not even sore, but I think the saddle is more comfortable than my kayak seat.

Over the weekend I saw various different animals. I saw a fox, a beaver, several young black bears, an elk, woodpeckers and this is some baby boisons that are at a farm so not really wildlife. 

Around Camp

I am really enjoying the warmer weather that we have been having. It has been great to get outside and start doing jobs around around camp. Today I think the temperature has been high teens. 

Through the winter lots of trees had
fallen down. As you can see trees
in this part of world are very
thin. To cold to grow out

The finished product. While sitting
on the roof sawing the branches
there were some really loud rolls
of thunder.

The Archery

Archery in use. The net was quite tricky to get up but
I was thankful that Andrea came and helped to get some
of the things set up

These are the girls cabins. They are quite basic. While carrying mattresses across to the boys cabins I had two deer watching me. 

I rode one of the mountain bikes around the mountain bike trails to clear of all the branches and trees that had fallen.

Inside looking up the tower. These
are the stairs that will
be climbed to get to the Zip
line. The required sweeping
and eventually some sanding.

My shadow up the climbing tower. I learnt how to run this, including how to
tie all the different knots.
The tower is 32ft to the top. It will soon have a Zip line from the top.

We have a school group in which is why all the activity had to get ready. This is some of them playing a small group game during activity time. It is fun to be interacting with them. 

A road sign that I think is really cool which I saw on the way to my 11th school visit. That is all the school visits for now done but hoping to be able to go to three more school. Two of them Rural and one High School

It is end of school year here so both Awanas I have been helping with have finished. So I am pleased that there are many more jobs to do around camp (a list of 12 on my board) and preparation for summer camp to be done. The next thing on the agenda is a Music Festival held at camp every year on the first weekend of June. 

Fort Nelson

In the weekend George and I went up to Fort Nelson for our final tradeshow for the year. Fort Nelson is 4 hours north from home. The tradeshow was smaller than the others we have been to but were able to introduce more people to the camp and give out some brochure/registration forms to possible campers. 

The road that we travel to get there is the Alaska Highway. It runs from Dawson Creek all the way to Alaska and was built by the US Army during WWII. This was so they could easily get support up to Alaska to protect them from attack from Russia. This place is called, Wonowon. It got it's name because it is located 101 miles up the Alaska highway from Dawson. 

A picture of what the road looked like most of the way. There are not so many Pine trees here but most of the way it was brown grass with pine. The Pine trees are short and very thin because of how cold it is. Between home and Fort Nelson we passed through three places, Wonowon, Buckinghorse River and Pink Mountian. These had nothing more than a worker camp and maybe a convienance store.

Along the way we saw some wildlife on the side of the road. This was one of two Elk

My first sighting of a bear. This is a cub that was looking for food on the side of the road. By time I took the picture it was running away.

The final destination for our trip. The last major stop before going to Yukon.

A sign that I found interesting in Fort Nelson

The sunset from the porch when I arrived back home on Sunday night.

I was able to get an information brochure about what is up that way and hoping to be able to go back up one day and do a tramp, go to the hot springs and see more interesting wildlife.