Emily’s birthday festivities continued this weekend. Em and her fiancé Corey (yeah! Fiancé! They got engaged just over a week ago!) had rented a chalet in Blue Mountain for the weekend, and after their love fest, Emily invited a bunch of us up there for a girls’ night out on Saturday.
As clearly demonstrated in that photo, Emily can barely contain her excitement. Also, not as demonstrated in that photo, you did not have to be blonde to participate. I get comments on this a lot, but it is just a coincidence. I think there was something in the water where we grew up.
Anyway, Blue Mountain is a ski resort, and kind of like Ontario’s version of Whistler (only nowhere near as awesome as Whistler). I have stayed there quite a few times for work, as my old organization’s alpine skiing championships took place there (I blogged about it a couple of times). In the summer the skiing conditions look like this…
It’s more of a giant hill than a mountain, but since we are mountainless in Ontario we have to get creative. Blue Mountain has a ton of summer activities in addition to winter skiing stuff, and it also has a really cute village with a bunch of restaurants, shops, bars, etc.
The gorgeous chalet Emily had rented was about a two minute walk from the village, so we arrived early Saturday afternoon, got all settled in, and headed over there to check it out.
The village was hopping! A live band was playing that was actually pretty good, and tons of people were out enjoying the sunshine. The people-watching was fantastic.
Our friend Leon is pregnant (yay baby!), so we hit up an Irish pub for lunch so she could feed her ginger fetus.
Em and I
Julie, Dawn, and Sara
I love beer on a sunny patio so, so much. One of my favourite summer activities.
I had a bagel on the way up so my hunger monster was not in danger of making an appearance and actually I wasn’t really hungry at all. I can always eat though, so Em and I ordered nachos to share with our table. They were ridiculously cheesy and delicious.
As nachos should be. Nobody else really had a great experience here though. The service wasn’t the best and a couple of the salads had brown lettuce. It’s hard to mess up nachos though, and I loved them, so my only complaint was that our server never came back so I could order more beer.
Since the day was beautiful, the rest of the afternoon was spent at the spa/pool area. The pool is indoors, but there were several different outdoor hottubs on various levels.
It was nice and leisurely.
The restaurants in the village are a bit more expensive than what’d you’d find for the same thing elsewhere (typical with touristy spots), so rather than eat out twice we decided to have a big family dinner, Jersey Shore style.
Can’t go wrong with frozen pizza!
Cheap and it hit the spot. And Leanne’s pasta salad was ridiculous and sounded really easy to make. I will have to recreate.
After dinner we played some games (toss the rings on the blow-up birthday cake), and did some shots…
And we also celebrated Dawn’s sister Melon’s birthday. Her cake was beautiful.
And very appropriate.
As is customary around here, we had some props for the bar. I’m pretty sure Dawn brought the entire contents of her Tickle Trunk, and we had some new additions also. Like this trumpet.
To replace the saxophone. The trumpet was actually more fitting for Emily, as she played the trumpet in high school.
And we also had the baby.
To replace Troy.
Dawn got Melon one of those random Dollar Store surprise bags for her birthday, which came with a colouring book complete with markers, so we brought those along as well. One of my favourite moments of the evening was when Melon coloured the lips of a random man with the red marker like lipstick.
This picture demonstrates it quite well also.
I was worried about the trumpet because when we had the saxophone we would put drinks in the bell of the saxophone and make people drink out of it, but I didn’t see how that was going to happen with the trumpet. When I brought up my concern to Dawn she said “Oh but we can just funnel a drink straight through the trumpet into someone’s mouth.”
So that’s what we did.
And then the bouncer came over and said he needed to confiscate the trumpet and here is how that conversation went:
Bouncer – I am going to have to take that trumpet.
Me – Why?
Bouncer – Because you just used it to pour a drink down someone’s throat.
Me – Oh, that’s true. We did do that.
Bouncer – We feel like that could happen again.
Me – Probably. It did work out really well the first time.
So the trumpet got taken away for a while. But we were able to get our “property” back as we were leaving to go to another bar.
We looooved that man’s soft leopard vest. Lucky Emily got to wear it.
Dawn had a couple of great recaps of our adventures as well if you want to check them out:
