Visit from FM Buddy Erin :)

After hanging out at Forward Motion for seven years, I now have had my first online friend visit me here on the farm! Hubby and I went to Yellowstone in June 2007 with Bonnie and her family and Mar and her son. I also hooked up with Mar for a week at Lake Tahoe in November 2008. But Erin and her family are the first place winners of the ‘coming to Canada to see Val’ contest. Their prize? Getting to eat my cooking, getting photographed, and getting blogged about!

Erin’s husband, Kevin, is a math professor who had a conference in Banff this past week. Turns out we weren’t far off their path heading down through Washington state visiting more friends and family.

Nearly eight-year-old T-Bug loves Lego. Good thing we’ve still got a lot of it kicking around our house!

Friday morning we went out to the nearby wildlife center. The wildlife wasn’t particularly interested in being viewed, however. Here’s Kevin with babykins at the top of one of the viewing towers. She enjoyed climbing up the many steps all by herself!

Somehow I didn’t manage to get a family photo of them. 🙁 But Erin and I gave Kevin both cameras and got him to shoot us a few times. Here’s the best one (not the funniest one, mind you. Not sure you want to see the various forms of Erin getting rolling with a good laugh…but if she joins Facebook as promised, I’ll have to put them there!) Oh, see Erin’s teeshirt? It’s an FM one: That’s MISTER Plot Bunny to you!

It was a short visit, under 24 hours, but it was great to meet Erin in person. I’ve spent time ‘babysitting’ T-Bug via Instant Messenger’s emoticons a time or two, so I’d already made a buddy with him a long time ago! And it was fun meeting Kevin and babykins, too. We even managed to mostly avoid talking shop! How’d that happen? 😛