Steven Reimer

Our last summer trip is nearly upon us, and it's a big one. A ~15 hour drive to Gardenton Manitoba. The plan as to how to drive it keeps changing, I believe now we're looking at driving through Friday night and arriving Saturday morning. This will be our first drive to Manitoba with kids. We had always flown, but now that both of our children are over 2 and require their own ticket, it's no longer financially feasible. Our drives this year to Kelowna, BC and Swan Lake, Montana have gone well (read: the kids didn't cry the whole time) so we have more confidence than we had when we first started talking about doing this drive in Spring.

Yesterday I picked up a new camera to replace our dying Canon Powershot S3 IS, which I purchased way back in May of 2006. I decided on a Sony NEX 3. It was the best bang for the buck that I could find. I'm really looking forward to playing with it all next week. I'm tempted to try and become a contributor at iStockphoto, so I'll be looking for shots that I could submit. Lots of potential on the farm for that - from landscape, to rustic machinery, to cute baby animals.

After this week of holidays, things will supposedly be going back to normal. I hope to resume work in the basement as that has been idle with all the yard work and holidaying.

Now if only my ribs would heal up.

Our family Montana camping trip was a success! We traveled to Swan Lake, Montana and spent a week camping with Julene's family. Activities included:

• tubing on the lake
• cooking over an open fire
• smores
• dealing with bug bites
• waterslides
• hiking
• shopping

I really enjoyed cooking over the fire. We made pancakes, bacon, potatoes, steak, pies (with pie irons) popcorn and of course, smores.

Just before we left, we bought a 1980 Bonair tent trailer which proved to be water tight, spacious (compared to a tent) and had a working fridge. It definitely helped with the kids' sleep and allowed us to store a few essentials like milk.

Joel and Abby did really well on the trip there and back which totaled about 8 hours of driving. Unfortunately, our Jeep and trailer was a couple feet too long for the Going to the Sun Road but at least that meant the alternate route was mostly empty and easy driving.

We now have 2 weeks at home before we try the ultimate drive to Manitoba. That drive will be partially split up. We'll hit Bow Island first, and then do the remaining 12 hours the next day, starting later in the morning so the kids can have afternoon naps and sleep part of the night while driving.

Go to my Picasaweb gallery to see more camping pictures.

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Here is a timelapse video of the sod/birthday party yesterday. I took this with my Samsung Galaxy S phone from Abby's bedroom window. The yard was mess, having rained all of Saturday so we were in the mud with our barefeet doing the best we could. The plan is to roll it a lot over the next week to try and get it as smooth as possible

A big thanks to all the guys who came out and helped, it made everything go so much faster and smoother!

Update
I thought I would add how I created the timelapse. I used TinaLapse for Android on my Samsung Galaxy S to take the pictures at a set interval. Afterwards, I copied the pictures to my laptop (running Ubuntu) and used ffmpeg to convert the series of images to a video using the following command:
ffmpeg -r 10 -b 1800 -i tt_img_%05d.jpg video.mp4

I played with the -r and -b values a bit to get the best result.