riverECHO

Wishing all of our family and friends a very Merry Christmas!

We wrapped up a very short work week in two days and spent yesterday afternoon bustling around to get ready for our Christmas Eve dinner with Brad and Gretchen and a 4 day tramp along the Routeburn and Caples tracks. Four trips to the grocery store reminded us that Christmas Eve is not the ideal day to go shopping. While the boys spent three hours shuttling a car to the end of the track, Gretchen and I started on the apple pie. We prepared a small plate of appetizers and awaited the return of BJ and Brad before cooking salmon, cous cous, corn on the cob, and a loaf of bread. It wasn’t the most traditional of Christmas dinners, but it was a delicious summer meal. We spent the remainder of the evening eating pie (without the burnt edges) and ice cream, listening to the rain and enjoying the fact that we weren’t spending the night in a tent, looking at our mini Christmas tree and talking about how un-christmassy this year felt, and looking for a Christmas movie on TV but resorting to watching and falling asleep to Monster’s Inc. This morning we are packing our backpacks and getting excited to hit the trail for a few days. We’ll celebrate Christmas in our tents at Lake McKenzie eating fine morsels of freeze dried food and, of course, chocolate. We’ll be thinking about you on the trail and hope you all have a wonderful holiday.