Echo Lake Retreat

So after the awesome weekend Caitlin and I had in Calgary and Banff, we came back to Medicine Hat and then left again on Tuesday for the Canadian Humanitarian retreat at Echo Lake in Montana.  The founders of the organization have a lake house there.  We followed Lyndon, the executive director of the organization, to the lake.  He actually went the wrong way at first which added about 1 hour to our trip.  It was supposed to be a 6 hour drive but it ended up being a little more than 7.  That felt like nothing compared to the road trips we had been making lately!  It was weird going through the border into the US.  The border patrol officer working at the gate wasn't friendly at all.  I was expecting them to be decent since Caitlin and I are American, like we part of the same club or something, but the guy was a jerk.  Kind of sucks that jerk people can be the first experience foreigners have with getting into America.  I remember thinking that when I came back from Korea too.

It was a pretty boring drive except these pretty fields occasionally

We stopped in Cardston to eat at Subway and stopped at the temple there too for a minute.

Anyways, the lake house was awesome.  The people that were there were me and Caitlin, Dick and Deb Northcott and their daughter Rachel, Carol and her family, and then Lyndon and his four girls and one of their friends.  The first day we were there was Canada Day, so we didn't do any work, but just had fun all day.  Caitlin had never tried water skiing before, but she got up pretty quickly - it didn't take her too many tries.  I got up on the single ski and afterwards my entire body was sore.  I forgot how tiring skiing can be, and I forgot how being in shape really helps with water skiing.  It was super fun though!  The water temperature was amazing!  It felt great and refreshing, not too cold or too warm, but just right.

The next few days I met with the other Canadian Humanitarian people for about 4 hours each day and we worked on work stuff.  After working though, it was all playing on the lake!  Caitlin also got a lot of reading done while we were inside working.  She read the first three Harry Potter books, and she liked them too!  I couldn't believe that she hadn't read those books when we were dating.  It's not that she just hadn't read them, she read the first two and part of the third and stopped because she was bored or didn't like it!  I couldn't believe it.  Anyways, Caitlin and I were pulled on tubes behind the boat and that was super funny!  Caitlin couldn't stop laughing while she was on the tube!  She fell off kind of a lot during one tube session, but she did great holding on for the most part, even when things were getting crazy!  I fell off once on a turn going pretty fast and it felt like I was skipping on the water for like 50 meters.  Almost lost my board shorts too...

View from the upper deck of the lake house.

View of the dock from the deck.

There are the tubes, one of the kayaks, the canoe, and the paddle board



I also found out that I love paddle boarding.  I wanted to be on the paddle board all the time that I wasn't in the boat.  Caitlin is small enough to take out the little green kayaks, but I was a little too big and fell in repeatedly when I tried one out.  Caitlin had a good laugh.  But we'd paddle over to this little cove every once in a while to see if we could spot any turtles.  We only saw one.  Here are some more pictures.

Later in the week we tried wake boarding.  Caitlin has wake boarded once before, so she got up this trip on her second attempt!  Woo!  At the beginning of the week, there were basically no other boats on the lake, but the closer it got to the weekend and the 4th of July, more and more boats were appearing.  So, it's a good thing we got some skiing in early in the week, and later we did mostly tubes and a little wake boarding.





Huge air off the wake!!! Just kidding.  I'm pretty terrible at wake boarding.

On the 4th of July there was a big breakfast at the LDS church in the area, but everyone at the lake house seemed like they didn't really want to go and said they'd make pancakes instead, so Caitlin and I slept in expecting to eat at the lake house.  BUT when we woke up, everyone had gone to the church already!  We hopped in the car and tried to find the church, but we didn't know where we were going and the GPS didn't know where the church was either.  So we ended up going out to eat breakfast at the Echo Lake Café which we found off of the main road and it was pretty good!

I got the corned beef hash and Caitlin got like a mixture of different pancakes.

**This is Caitlin jumping in really quick.  I just have to say that it was SUCH a fun, relaxing time at the lake!  It was kind of annoying having so many kids around so that we didn't get to ski or wake board very much for the amount of time we were there, but it was fine because I was SO SORE from both water skiing and wake boarding.  Those muscles I never use!  Also, we rode on the adult tube rides with the big teenage boys who loved being super intense and ramming the two tubes together.  At one point I was about to flip off and we bumped into their tube so I just hopped over onto it while going full speed!  It was awesome.  After that the two teenagers kept trying to hop from tube to tube but were not as successful as I was.  I loved reading so much, I loved getting a tan, I loved being fed and not having to worry about food (thanks, Deb!), I just loved so much of it!  It was so nice of them to invite us to come along.  Also, spur of the moment going out to breakfast with Billy was so fun!  I think the best part of the whole trip was not wearing make up honestly haha and just being able to jump in the lake whenever and not having to worry about anything.  The temperature was so nice and everything was so chill, it was amazing.  Ok I'm done now.**


The next day we woke up really early and left for the Kalispell airport in Montana to fly Caitlin to San Diego.  It was pretty sad, since we wouldn't be seeing each other again for a couple months.  After that, I drove back to Medicine Hat. 

The GPS took me through Glacier National Park and that was amazing!  I wish Caitlin was there to see it with me.  I kept hoping that I'd see a bear, and sure enough about 10 minutes after wishing that, I had to stop to let a bear cross the road!  It was awesome!  I also saw a deer, but it was only just a deer, so not that exciting.  Going through the border to get back into Canada, they had me park and asked me tons of questions in their station.  It took about 20 minutes, but I got through and had a pretty uneventful drive back to Medicine Hat.  It was a great retreat at the lake!