Bourques in Barcelona: December 2010

Our first Christmas at Grand Lake in New Brunswick was GREEN but sunny! Pat and I arrived at the end of November to open up the house. There were some glitches in our heating system which required a couple of visits from the heating sub-contractor to rectify. On November 29th, we drove to Bangor, Maine as Pat was to fly out via Detroit to Coty business meetings near Raleigh-Durham, NC. We met back again in Bangor on the night of December 2nd, returning to the lakehouse the following day via St. Stephen (before the flooding) and a visit to Ganong Chocolates and Ovenhouse Smoked Salmon in St. George.

On December 7th, Pat had to head back to Spain to return to work. He was severely delayed in both Montreal and Paris due to weather conditions, and finally reached our home on the Med some 30 hours after he set out! (He could have travelled to Malaysia in that time frame!) I spent a week in a very cold and snowy Montreal with Jen and Ben and was able to visit The Farm one day to have lunch with my aunt and uncle and cousin, Beth. Ben returned home to NS to help out with the family's Christmas tree farm for a week. I returned to NB the day after some 200+ mm of rain fell which led to some terrible floods and high water on the Saint John River and at Grand Lake. Fortunately our new home is situated on a bluff some 25+ ft. overlooking the lake, so no danger of flooding here! Some of the roads leading to the lake experienced high water and flooding which made travel interesting! It was sort of like driving along a causeway for part of the way!

Steph and Lou were the first on December 21st to arrive after her interview for Paediatrics residency in the Portland, ME children's hospital. Jen and Ben arrived from Montreal the following day and Pat got in late on Lou's birthday, December 23rd, having changed his flight plan to go through JFK airport and on to Bangor, where he rented a car to drive to the lake. It didn't look like his original flight via Paris and Montreal were going to work out what with the snowy weather in Europe.

Luckily for all of us, the weather on this end was mild and there were no issues with the driving. The snow only fell on Pat's birthday, December 27th and now "it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas"!

The gang over the cheese fondue pot on Christmas Eve: Lou, Ben, Jen, Pat and Steph