We took a slightly circuitous route in our travels to get to London. We dipsy- doodled around the outskirts of Detroit, en route to our crossing back to Canada at Port Huron/Sarnia. Along the way (and just north of Detroit), we did get a chance to stop at one of David's childhood memories, a Big Boy restaurant:
As we pulled up to Canada immigration and customs at the border David wondered out loud, which person should he 'pick' (having a choice of four open spots .. an unheard of occurrence in the middle of an afternoon if we had chosen to cross over at Detroit/Windsor!). I don't think I could have picked a better person. She was delightful, asking us questions about our trip and wishing she could do such a neat family trip .. and remembering the days that her family used to do a mini-version of the same thing. We crossed in to Canada very smoothly. As we drove over the bridge, the kids were all rejoicing and commenting how nice it was to be 'back home' in Canada!
We stopped at Pam's aunt and uncle's in Sarnia first for a couple of hours. They are Aunt Beth and Uncle Hans. Their five kids are all grown up and doing there own thing in various parts of the country (Cape Breton, western Quebec, Toronto, Owen Sound, and even as far away as Whitehorse .. hard to get much more spread out than that!). Here is a picture of the house they all grew up in .. and the house we had just pulled up to:
Aunt Beth, despite having an operation less than a week before was making cookies for us. We had a delightful time in their backyard having a cold drink and cookies:
We also spent some time reminiscing about the trip, and talking about various other goings-on, including the 'missed' second stroke that Pam's dad had about 10 days earlier. We had only just found out the night before when Pam called home to chat with her mom (as she did from time to time). As it turned out there was a so-called conspiracy going on for everyone to make sure they did not tell us in case we decided to come home early. Of course by this time we had long since decided to come home 'early'. In fact, our return on April 29 being precisely three weeks sooner than our original planned return date. It was a neat coincidence, if we can call it that.
We headed on to London from Sarnia, which is only a short one hour hop away. Rob Deane and his children, Laura and Ryan live on the northwest side of town so we were able to sneak in through a northern route right to their house. We have visited them on a several occasions, so when we arrived we were definitely feeling like we were 'getting close'. We had a nice dinner at a local restaurant (Jack Aster's):
Notice above the two pictures. We were actually separated because they were very busy that night (we did not have reservations) and it was easier to get two tables with fewer people at each. We opted for the 'guys' table and the 'gals' table.
In fact, this was the very restaurant that David, Reba, Daniel, and James had gone to when Rob had returned from his brief work time over in Lebanon just before we took off for our trip. This whole visit would truly be unexpected by the plans of a number of months previous. Rob had taken his two children to Lebanon for what appeared to be a two year work trip in early October. Unfortunately, the whole trip was cut short just before Christmas when Rob had a fairly serious accident and had to be flown in private jet to a hospital in Switzerland. The Bible says that "Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails." As it turned out, we were very grateful that Rob, Laura, and Ryan were back. Reba and James are best friends of Laura and Ryan and the thought of having them gone so long was fairly distressing to them when they had decided to go over the previous fall. And here we all were, together again!
The next morning we saw Laura and Ryan off to school, snapped a morning picture of their house:
And then packed our stuff and eagerly headed east to Kanata .. and home!