Daniel & Melissa's blog: July 2022

July was a pretty big deal around here. Daniel completed his PhD. He is now a Philisophical Doctor of Mechanical Engineering. July was also Lukas' first soccer camp. That might have been a bigger deal than the PhD. Our big trip to Vancouver also made July pretty awesome.

The Defense:

Daniel after his defense.

The faithful friends from the lab who waited around 1.5 hours for Daniel to emerge
from the closed portion of his defense, so they could congratulate him.

Soccer:

The Hooligans, playing soccer while Lukas was away at soccer.

Lukas especially loved defense

Team Mexico giving their cheer to the closing ceremony crowd

Vancouver:

These people were traveling rockstars. We travelled for 14 hours: we flew, rode train, walked through downtown to the sea-bus, walked to the rental car place, drove to the the ferry (where we waited on the hot road for 3 hours to get on and only got on that ride because of a miracle of God), and finished driving to our spot up the coast.

On the ferry. Can you tell which one napped in the car?

DRIVING the ferry.

The Bridge

With Captain Shaun, who seemed to have given up his break to show us the bridge.

Finally in bed after the long trip.

Riding the log bull.
And see the pier behind them? Daniel jumped off that due to a marital
miscommunication. Will we stop having those at some point?

And after a couple lovely days up the coast, we went back into the city for Daniel's conference.

Our city house, with books from the library

Capilano River had some nice views of mountains and ocean

All the living things were bigger and stronger in the tropical NW

Blue hydrangeas were everywhere

We had hoped to do a whale-watching expedition but as we looked into it realized it wasn't so realistic for our ages. So we went to the Aquarium! No great animal photos from there, but we loved the otters, Cinco the blind sea lion, the iMax movie about salmon, and the millions of different species. Isn't God creative?! And sometimes funny.

Ice Cream. At the aquarium.
Something Mama would NEVER splurge on, but Auntie Hanna had given
money for an ice cream outing, so we did it and it was glorious!!

Kitsilano beach, a 15 minute walk from our house. We did this a lot.
We each had our own towel, and our own Zevia. It was a pretty big deal.

These boys made those flags at home before coming to the beach :)

The tide pools were pretty cool. Lukas spent hours catching things,
and of course made lots of friends in the process.

Rest time crafting

The library, a 5 minute walk from our house

And this is a Daniel adventure. We missed the opportunity to do a gondola tour of a nearby mountain, so Papa found this tree walk in the Botanical Gardens of UBC. Can you tell how high it is, at the top of those huge trees? It was a pretty remarkable setup. After the gardens we went in search of supper restaurant food, which eventually resulted in delicious gluten free offerings, after some inner turmoil. After the restaurant, we visited the closest beach, which had mixed reviews from the locals. We're hoping the children forget about it.