Family Visiting from Germany

I only have one cousin on my mother's side of the family.  By comparison, on my father's side of the family there are 17 in my generation... 14 cousins, my two brothers, and me.  

My cousin Roswitha is almost the same age as me.  She and her husband Gunnar and their daughters Melanie and Vivien are visiting Canada this year from their home in Germany.  Margarit and I stopped in briefly at their place 11 years ago, on our way home from Austria.  Roswitha and her family visited Canada six years ago, and we spent some time together then.  The two daughters were here last year, staying with my Mom.

This time around they flew in to Vancouver, rented a car, and then camped their way across British Columbia to Alberta.  Unfortunately this has been one of the wettest summers in recent memory, and it has not been ideal for tenting.  They were in Canmore at a hotel on Friday, and caught up on some laundry on Saturday morning before heading up to Nordegg to meet with us.  The girls and my Mom and I had all headed out on Friday evening.  On Saturday it was pretty cozy in the cottage with ten of us sleeping in there... not to mention all the pets.

We had a big meal on Saturday night and spent most of the weekend just visiting.  On Saturday evening the girls went out for a ride in the ATV and Hailey managed to bury it in a big mudhole.  We got a phone call asking for help.  Margarit and I headed out with the second ATV and tried to pull them out but we couldn't do it.  Eventually we had to call my neighbor Rob to come and give us a hand.  With his quad and my second Side-by-Side pulling, we managed to yank them out, just as it was getting dark.  At this point I had been up to my knees in mud and everyone was very wet and dirty.  We headed back to the cottage and cleaned up a bit before eventually turning in.

The next morning Margarit took all the young girls over to McKenzie's and they went for a trail ride.

By mid afternoon the Germans had to carry on and they packed up and headed down to Kananaskis.  They were meeting my brother Greg and his wife Barb down there for a couple of days of hiking.  

It was cool and showering for most of the weekend and we didn't get as much rain as the forecast was calling for.  But it wasn't the greatest weekend for being outside.  We did get some of our wet firewood going in the firepit... though only briefly.  Before the relatives arrived I managed to cut up all the old logs piled beside our driveway and we got a bunch of them split.  That was the extent of my work for this weekend, but we are slowly getting our yard tidied up.
I didn't even bother to take my big camera with me this weekend as I knew there would be no time to go shooting.  Turns out I didn't take any photographs with my digital camera either.  And the batteries died in my trail camera, so there weren't even any images from that.  This one was taken with a cell phone camera....