On the water

Sunday was a beautiful day, though a little bit windy. It might have been the last beautiful weekend day for awhile, so we decided to attempt a family outing in our trusty canoe, the SS Meerkat. Previous to this day, we had only attempted a canoe outing in the presence of at least one other adult, but today we decided to just go for it alone as a family. Here are the troops at the launching point. Tryfan was totally stoked but Rhiannon didn't really want to go.
We are so lucky to have not one, but FOUR lakes that are connected by navigable waterways in our neighborhood. We started near Ulvenvannet, then around Verkensvannet, then Nordvannet and Svinesjoen. On the first leg of our journey, I had Tryfan sitting between my legs in the bow (front) of the canoe while Rhiannon sat in the middle and Rhodri at the stern. Here is a self take of me and Tryfs.
And the rest of our party behind us.
We stopped on a little island and had a picnic, then set off back to our port. After this picnic, Tryfan really wanted to be in the middle with Rhiannon rather than under strict supervision in the front with me. The tricky part was convincing Tryfan to sit still and not walk around or lean over the edge! That's when I busted out the bag of gummy sweets. I started by doling out one at a time, but by now it was getting really windy and we needed to just get back to port before things went horribly wrong. So after about 10 minutes of halting my paddling every few seconds to dole out more sweets, I just gave Rhiannon the whole bag and told her to only have 1 at a time for both herself and Tryfan as long as they both stayed still. She completely ignored the "1 at a time" part -- Rhodri described Tryfan clutching his two fistfulls of sweets and smiling a big, wide smile. Here they are sitting (laying) still:
Anyway, we made it back to port without anyone falling in or even really getting wet! It was a huge success and we look forward to more family canoe outings.

As we pulled up to the dock, there was a lady who was drying off her kayak and she had no legs! Rhiannon asked me why this lady was "so tiny" and I said that everybody is different and some people are tiny in this way. Probably not the best answer, but I didn't have much time to think about it and I could tell that the lady had heard Rhiannon ask this. We chatted with this lady a little in Norwegian and then we switched to English when she asked Rhodri to help her get the kayak into the shed. She explained that her normal kayaking partner wasn't able to come on this day but she really wanted to get out on the water so she went by herself anyway - though it took her a long time to get the kayak out of the rack in the storage shed and over to the water to launch herself! Both Rhodri and I were completely in awe of her understated determination to spend her Sunday kayaking -- very inspiring.