Life On The Ranch: Week 10 Summary

I'm sure we can all agree that the first full week of 2021 got off to a blazing start. For us, much like a lot of North America, Monday started with the revelation that Slack was suffering from a worldwide outage.

Rich heavily relies on Slack for his job, so much of Monday morning was spent mindlessly refreshing the Slack System Status webpage and enjoying to thoughts of people on Twitter who were suffering from the same fate.

Moving onwards, the following graphic nicely sums up our Wednesday. (Credit @Blooshier on Twitter).

We followed along, watching roughly 7 hours of news coverage. The only real highlight of the day was the discovery of everyone's new Favourite Irish Reporter, Donie O'Sullivan, who in the last 7 days has added over 100,000 followers to his Twitter account.

So that was the first half of the week.

Fortunately, for us at least, the rest of our time was spent in relative peace after the excitement of Christmas and NYE. Here's how it all unravelled on Week 10 at Myra Canyon Ranch.

Time for a Detox

Our apartment in Vancouver was directly above a liquor store and an Irish Bar. This made it far too easy to drink far too much and over the last 18 months, having a few drinks most days after work became the norm.

We've decided that moving forwards we will try to only drink at the weekends and on special occasions, which is made so much easier by the fact that the nearest liquor store is a 15 minute drive from us!

We also needed to reset our diet, after the excesses of December, so we spent a lot of the week eating soups, salads and lots of veggies. We did make a "mini-roast" using some Christmas extras, and couldn't quite make it through the week without one charcuterie board, but we definitely felt a bit healthier overall this week.

We broke our 8 day booze fast on Friday afternoon, but unfortunately I hadn't properly chilled our beers so our first alcoholic drinks of 2021 were definitely not worth the wait!

Canada Post Kept Christmas Coming

Back in early November, my mum was worried about us "missing out" at Christmas. This is the longest either of us have gone without seeing our immediate and extended families and there have been a few times in the past 12 months that I have been painfully homesick.

Unknown to us, Mum decided to reach out to my family and asked them all to send us a little decoration for our tree so that we would feel like part of "home" was with us for Christmas.

Unfortunately, with a worldwide pandemic in full swing in addition to the usual Christmas backlog, the majority of the decorations did not make it and my mum had to let us in on the surprise.

Since early January, packages have been arriving thick and fast with beautiful personalised baubles and lovely thoughtful messages.

I am already so excited to decorate our 2021 Christmas Tree!

We Took Advice from a Total Stranger

One of the things we love about living at the ranch, is the abundance of hiking trails nearby. There are so many beautiful walks to choose from.

On Sunday, Rich mapped out a 5km route for us to do and we set out. We knew there would be a small incline on our walk, but it appeared to be quite gradual so we didn't take any provisions with us.

About 20 or so minutes into the walk a cyclist approached us and asked if we were going to "the lake". When we said no, he strongly encouraged us to do so and gave us directions.

We decided to bite the bullet even though it would likely add another 30 minutes to the walk.

The views were insanely beautiful (as always in this part of the world), but the walk to get to them almost finished us! Worse still, because the original route was a loop, we still had to walk the extra 2 or so kilometres back to the ranch!

By the time we got back, Rich was deathly pale and we were both total hot messes. One day, we will actually head out prepared for our hike!

Our First Day Date of 2021

After all of the detoxing and exercising, we decided the best course of action would be to undo our hard work!

In what is becoming more and more of a rarity, we drove off the ranch and headed into downtown Kelowna. We drove to the first car park we found on Google Maps and promptly left when we realised it would be $22.50 for a 3 hour stay!

Fortunately we did manage to find a second option, for a much more reasonable $3, and in even better news it was closer to our destination!

Our destination was the Kelowna Yacht Club Cactus Club Café. Back in Vancouver we were semi regular visitors at Cactus, but this was our first time at a Kelowna venue.

We sat at a high top table with lush views over the harbour area and in a prime spot for people watching. As we had the car we only had a small beer each, but more than made up for it with the food - a cheeseburger and chips for me and a half rack of Jack Daniels ribs for Rich.

After settling up ($57.16, including a 20% tip - very reasonable for Canada), we practically had to be rolled out of the restaurant. We had intended on going for a walk along the waterfront, however the weather was a bit drizzly so we picked up a bottle of local wine instead and finished the weekend by watching three episodes of The Crown.

The end of this week signals two and a half months already done at the ranch! We can't believe how quickly our time here is going, but we are still loving every single second and are still 100% sure we made the best decision in moving here.