Christmas 2019

More the merrier!

Christmas 2019

Depending on which day of the week Christmas lands on, you either get a long weekend to anticipate it's arrival, or it sneaks up on you mid week. This year Christmas landed on a Wednesday and Helen and I both worked Monday and Tuesday. Thankfully, Grandma took the kids so we arrived in Victoria on Christmas Eve!

I find it hard to take photos of people opening gifts. First - they are usually looking at the object they are opening rather than at the camera. Second - I want to open my gifts too! Santa was generous this year!

Two of the kids (Nara and Marcus) received Cameras from Santa so all of the kids wanted to go out and take photos. Of course there aren't a lot of flowers in January, but the kids did wander around the house looking for anything photo worthy.

Four kids get bored easily so we decided to take a ride over to the park to play. Amazingly, my dad does have four bikes for kids and two more bikes for adults. Used bikes are often quite cheap and sometimes all they need are new tires. We were off for a bike ride!

The kids have been playing at McMinn park basically their whole life. About two years ago it got an upgrade and now has a really good sized zipline. Of course kids aged 7 to 9 want to make it more "extreme" by standing on the seat and swinging, rather than just going for a ride. Thankfully, no falls downs and lots of laughing.

My favorite part was the new photographers chasing the riders trying to get a snap. I have a fancy camera with a lot of auto-focus abilities. It's hard to expect a sub $500 compact to achieve similar results.

The climbing part of the playground isn't challenging enough, but the kids did think it was fun to all get on the swing and go for a ride together.

Apparently the City of Victoria paid a ton of money for a lights display outside of city hall. We decided to drive down around sunset to see the lights. The lights were expensive and apparently arrived late. We also discovered they weren't reliable - they had an electrical problem on Christmas eve and being Christmas, no one was around to fix them! We walked over to Chinatown to take some photos in the dying light of the day.