Today was mostly a rest day. All the boys slept in quite late for them, about 8:30am for Leo which is unheard of and they looked tired all day but were still determined to go to the beach at some point.
The weather wasn't great first thing with lots of rain but that suited us as everyone needed to just flop about and recover a bit.
I sorted out some washing and pottered about, Rob popped to Sainsbury's and we ended up going to the beach at about 4 o'clock.
We set up the base camp and Leo and Oscar were straight in the water. The tide was coming in and the waves were big! They also did a bit of sledging down the dunes which they really enjoyed, apart from the walking back up.
I'd promised Ellis that we could walk to the "rock thing" as he kept calling it but it was a little shelter up on the hill. It was nice to have a stroll and a chat about lots of different things and it was good to check in with him about he was feeling about going back to school, how he had felt during lockdown etc. He wishes he'd done more school work 🤯
It's very windy out there, but not too cold. We are sitting in the living room with the double doors open on to the balcony and it's quite comfortable.
Surfing lessons tomorrow. I don't know what I was thinking signing myself up for them! It will be good for me to have a go at something new and to push myself way out of my comfort zone. I hope the boys like it.
I'm very tired. 😴
Where they to? 19th August Montreal
We were hopeful that today would be a bit more on our intellectual level than yesterday, and so it proved to be. We visited the Olympic Park and the Biodome. The Olympic Park was built - although it wasn't completed in time - for the 1976 summer games at a cost of $1.4billion. The Biodome, which is part of the park, was initially the olympic velodrome and is shaped, on the outside, like an enormous helmet.
The stadium has evolved quite a bit over the years and is now something of a costly white elephant - it's used only around 15 days per year and is still, 21 years on, far from fully paid for. Once the games were finished, various events were held here. Football (until the league collapsed), Canadian football(sic) (until the team moved), baseball (until the team moved), concerts (until the concert arena was built in downtown) and so on. In desperation to use the venue and recoup the costs, they decided they had to build a roof. This allows the stadium to be used for an annual monster-truck show, an annual moto-x show and various trade shows. There has to be a lesson to be learned for London 2012 from this place and the disastrous Millenium Dome although I wouldn't put it past Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone to leave British taxpayers with a similar legacy.
The stadium roof is quite a feat of engineering. The stadium isn't able to support a roof due to the way it was built so they had to build a great big leaning tower to suspend it from - the tallest inclined tower in the world. Of course, being suckers for a good gimmick, we took the oddly named funicular (a fancy name for a slanting elevator, I presume) to the top to survey the city, the St-Lawrence river, the historic docks and the botanical gardens (the second biggest in the world behind London). The views were impressive but it was always going to be hard to make our jaws drop with the CN Tower still so fresh in our memories.
We also took the guided tour of the stadium which included the swimming complex. Mush reckoned she'd dive off the top diving board but I reckon she was only saying that because she knew she wouldn't be allowed to prove it. Mind you, that's not to say that I'd do it either. Can you imagine the sound of the slap of a belly flop from that high up? Of course, we had the obligatory bloke on the tour who feels duty bound, when asked if anyone has any questions, to pose countless inconsequential quandaries that neither he nor anyone else cared to hear the answer too but, just in case you were interested, I can now reveal that the stadium does, indeed, have heating, that it no longer fulfils olympic stadium criteria and that our guide has absolutely no idea how many visitors there are each year to the stadium.
In the lobby of the stadium, there is a wall of posters going back over the last century that were used to advertise each olympic games. One that caught my eye was from the Stockholm games in 1912. Presumably it was the inaugural year of the gymnastic floor-dancing with ribbons competition. I can't say I'm surprised that it doesn't feature as a men's event any more.
The Biodome was good fun, although, they might want to think about opening the windows every once in a while - it was awfully stuffy for the poor animals living in there. We took a few pictures which you can see below. First, we saw some capibaras having a scrap over a comfy stone that they both wanted to lie on, then an anaconda soaking in the water with just his nose poking above the surface, next some beautiful blue parrots having a flap and a squawk but we were most captivated when we caught a glimpse of this really nice beaver. Unfortunately, it was flapping about a bit too much to get a decent picture but you can just about make it out if you look carefully.
We got back to the hotel, where we have a communal kitchen, to find that some kind soul had stolen most of our milk which we were due to use for our cereal tomorrow morning. I'm pretty sure I know who it was from seeing the way they were 'exploring' the fridge earlier on so, feeling my blood begin to boil, more at the principle and the inconvenience than the cost of a pint of milk, I went back to our room to plot my revenge. The salt sachets that we, ironically, ourselves stole from McDonald's only days ago would come in handy sooner than expected in helping me exact my retribution on those who stole from us. I only hope that they swig directly from the bottle and that I happen to be passing the door when they next decide to try to deprive an Englishman of his tea.
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