Ribfest in Barrie 2012

Bdot’s friend Jessica came down for a visit Thursday. She ended up staying Thursday and Friday night. They did a lot of catching up in the backyard over a few glasses of wine. Friday Jess when down to Niagara on the Lake to see a war 19th century re-enactment. She is a teacher and wanted to get a bunch of photos for her history class. I saw Jess for bits and pieces, it was a fun visit, I think we addicted her to the Tour. Speaking of which… Sad to see Garmin failing all over and Ryder is out. Blah.

Saturday was a busy day. The day started off right with an hour of massage therapy. Ahh. Really after a massage I just want to melt into a couch but we had a tee time north of Barrie and Ribfest with the Brother in Law waiting, so off we went. Well we tried to. As always seems to be the case in Southern Ontario, road closures come at ridiculous times with no thought whatsoever to commuters. Such was the case Saturday as King road was closed. It is the main East/West road through Bolton and it was closed for repaving around noon on a Saturday afternoon. Seriously. WTF you idiots. You can’t schedule a closure of a main road during the evening or a weekday? Unbelievably moronic. So we had to go *around* which meant voyaging into a Bolton subdivision nightmare. *eyeroll* After about 15m of frustration we were back onto King road heading toward our destination. The tee time was changed then changed again to ‘we’ll get you in whenever you arrive’. *snort* We made pretty good time and arrived in Horseshoe Valley just after 3. The best brother in law in the universe had iced coffees and Gatorade prepared for us. How awesome is that? We ventured over to Horseshoe Highlands Golf Course to shoot a bucket of balls at their driving range. Getting there we passed through a really nice subdivision full of premium estate homes. I tried bdot’s driver at the range and magically hit a few good drives. I think it has been years since I’ve hit two or more decent drives on the same day. For me golf really is about small victories otherwise I doubt I’d play it. Horseshoe Highlands seemed like a high end course, I think green fees were around $100 a pop, well outside what I’m willing to spend to chase a ball around in the sun. No… we paid about a tenth of that up the road at the Orillia Golf & Country Club. Yes the courses and facilities are night and day but for my enjoyment and skill level, dropping $100 on green fees right now seems outrageous.

The course was pretty flat. Most of the holes were also quite long 380-450 yards. Naturally once I stepped up to drive in a real situation my previous luck at the range evaporated. Before we teed off on the second hole we decided not to keep score. We were just out for fun anyway. That seemed to work out fine. It was hot. I think close to 30… as the day wore on I wore on too felling pretty weary after about four holes. One of the holes had an entire half of the green covered with geese. The bastards wouldn’t move either. I’m not sure how to score a fowl foul. *shrug* It was a fun afternoon with everyone looking for the silver lining in a round of pretty bad golf. Still, fun, outside, good company. I see the attraction, you don’t have to be good at golf to enjoy golf. After golfing we all cleaned up and eagerly proceeded to the next stage of the day, Ribfest.

The rib vendors seem to change a bit every year, there were some I recognized from previous years and a few new ones. We usually divide and conquer to get a sampling from a few different vendors, so we each picked a line and waited for ribs. Dinner ended up being a delicious pulled pork sandwich, my BiL had two. There were also a bunch of local small brewers there available with samples of their various beers. We tried beers from all the vendors : Flying Monkeys Brewery, NickelBrook, Lake of Bays Brewery, Cameron’s Brewery, Amsterdam Brewery and King Brewery. The beer lowdown : Monkey’s Mango beer which bdot loved (we tried to find where to buy it and discovered it was event only beer and wasn’t for sale… uh… stupid), Amsterdam’s Big Wheel, Cameron sadly didn’t have any dark beers – just an ale and an amber… (booo!! fail -1), sadly we didn’t like anything from King and Nickel Brook’s Maple Porter was a tasty sipper. After all that beer and meat I only had room for a cob of corn then I was maxed and felt like I could explode. It was curious how quickly the crowd vanished once the booze stopped flowing at 10PM. Hmmpt. We debated about staying in Horseshoe Valley for the night but bdot had the stamina to drive so we decided to push home. It was an awesome day.

Bdot was out most of Sunday morning/afternoon. She started off getting her golf swing accessed by a CGA Pro. Afterwards she went shopping for a bathing suit then groceries. I got my game on and did some housework and laundry. Pretty exciting stuff. I started a ‘new to me’ game, a MMORPG, called Dungeons and Dragon’s Online. What a pleasant surprise it is. It seems to have a decent community, the game looks good and for old school D&Ders like myself, the game mechanics are familiar, oh, and did I mention it’s FREE. Not sure why anyone would pay $10/m for World of Warcraft when they could DDO for free. I haven’t noticed much free only restriction so far. The paid options appear to include a special DDO store, more characters and unique quests. But with my free account I haven’t found anything that would dissuade me from playing. There is tons to do. I’m sure I’ll blog more about this title as I expect I’ll sink some time into it.

Our day lilies are blooming in the backyard. I think they look amazing! I hope the evil red beetle doesn’t find them back there.

One of the backyard lilies

It has been a week since we resorted to chemical warfare to attempt to save the backyard lawn. I’d say the results are mixed. Yes, it has killed a great number of some types of weeds but the clover seems pretty strong in a number of areas still and the chemical killed any unestablished grass we had… so… *shrug* the battle continues. I weeded part of the patio… I guess the backyard is tolerable now, albeit barely.

In the evening we got sucked into one of the Bourne movies. I love that series. It is a shame Damon didn’t want to do any more films in that series… it was one of the few male led characters I really enjoyed. Back to a full work week… ho-hum.