Sunday 2nd. "Who's got the keys"

Never one for sitting still, we catapult ourselves into week two with a day trip to White Rock, a seaside town on the Canadian, US boarder. It has a feel of Brighton about it, you know, the nice part before you get to Hove (sorry Em), a long promanarde consisting mainly of eateries and bars that look out at the Pacific ocean. Oh yea and it has a big white rock on the beach.

I must confess that I did have an ulterior motive for the trip to White Rock as is just so happens to be the location of what we call in the trade, a nice looking, low mileage little Haddock that I'd spotted in the auto trader. Ed ( Haddock & Bloater = Motor). It had suddenly dawned on me that we had to return the hire car at the end of the week and if I wasn't careful we stood a very good chance that we could end up with the kids not having a school and we would not have a car, a prospect that had me instantly braking out in a cold sweat.

I had decided after days of in depth research and hours of deliberation, weighing up our needs verses the needs of the environment, that a large "people carrier" based vehicle was probably the best way to go. Encouraged by Nicola who said "we are getting a people carrier end of discussion", so I set about narrowing the field down to a few candidates, these turned out to be the Honda or the Toyota. and you can imagine my further disappointment when I found out that neither model was available with a 5.5 litre, gas guzzling, fuel injected V8 motor. However, I digress, the car in White Rock turned out to be a bit of a dog, so we passed on that one and some what disappointed in not finding our dream car first time, we headed for White Rock and comfort food, fish and chips and ice cream.

Now having spent all of last week training (shouting at the boys) to lock their own car doors, as our bottom of the range rent a car came without central locking, was something I was just about going to regret.

Pull up at the sea front and straight into a parking place, Easy Peezy, Lemon Squeezy. Jump out and stroll over to the talking pay and display meter only to find that my now hyper trained troops were out and off, heading for a full on beach assault, but this time, for the first time ever, they had locked all the car doors, including mine, but this time with the keys still in the car.........perfect! Still every cloud has a sliver lining and I manage to find a very nice female Police Officer with an enormous great Colt .44 magnum strapped to the side of her, who very kindly called a man named Earl, who had a "Slim Jim" who dutifully proceeded to break into our car and retrieve the keys, all for the paltry sum of $75.00.........bargain.

All in all a good day, topped off by a trip to the late showing of Shrek 3 with lots of......"man there was some evil gases Eeking out of my butt that day," jokes, a favourite of the Sushams.