Trip to John's Cottage
On the weekend of July 31st John and his girlfriend Katie invited some of their friends down to his cottage. This has been the entire highlight of my summer up until this point. This section of the website is because I can't send these pics easily to the people involved in the trip. So I'm using this webspace sort of like a communal album using some of the highlight pics.
Anyhow this is where the story begins. Shortly after arriving we went down to the beaches of Inverness. I forgot my camera so there are no pics to show. After getting back we had supper and then made a fire to sit by. Then the camera came out. This first pic is off the host and hostess, along with Ritchie and Christopher. They didn't realize I took the picture and therefore didn't pose. John is the guy in the back on the left, while Christopher is the guy in the back on the right. Ritchie is the guy in the front, and Katie is the girl on the front right.
After having a few beer, the cigars came out. John was given some cigars at work and was nice enough to share them with everybody. The picture below is Christopher enjoying one, while showing off his talent to smoke and drink at the same time. The cigars were real Cubans and really smooth.
What good is having a fire if you don't have a weenie roast? After a few people got hungry we gathered sticks to roast hotdogs over the fire. They turned out ok and were good. Christopher was too good for hotdogs and roasted a sausage over the fire. His sausage got burnt but he ate it anyway. It's pictured on the right. It is so burnt that it reflected the camera flash making it appear silver!
When the hotdogs were gone we broke out marshmallows to roast. We didn't have the stuff to make smores though. The pic below shows one of the many uses of marshmallows. When John made a second trip around with the cigars we ran out of matches. Not to worry, I intentionally set my marshmallow ablaze so John could have a light.
This pic has Johnny K and Alexi. Johnny K on the left, Alexi in the middle, and Ritchie on the right.
When you're the camera man it's hard to get a photo of yourself. John was good enough to take a picture of me and my cousin Christopher enjoying our beer... actually Ritchies beer :P
Everybody got up at different times the next day. So while we waited for everybody to get up Ritchie decided to make the best of roughing it by using his laptop to look at pics and listen to music.
After we got temporarily bored with the laptop Ritchie and me found some toys that John's parents had bought for John when he was younger. We began to fiddle with the Lego like toys and built the "carhouse and car" below. My "carhouse" is on the left and Ritchie's "car" is on the right.
At some point throughout the day we decided to go golfing. This new golf course had just opened in Inverness and we wanted to try it. Well, words alone can't explain how terrible the course was. It is by far the worst golf course in the world! It is actually amusing to do the course just to laugh at it. The greens were just sandtraps, the fairways weren't mowed properly, and if you hit the ball into the rough it was gone. Between the four of us that actually golfed, there was only one hole where we all hit our drives without anyone losing a ball! Through the first 3 holes we lost about 6 of the 14 golf balls we had! We even lost some on the fairways! On the last hole my teammate Ritchie and John's teammate Johnny had to quit because they ran out of golfballs.
Anyhow the golf course had a makeshift clubhouse as seen in the picture below. You know it's got to be a good course when they hang a bristol board sign saying "golf course open" of a giant garbage can:P
We went to the driving range to practice first. Christopher had a broken ankle and couldn't golf on it. That didn't stop him from attacking John with a golf club, as seen in the pic below.
Another sign that we were at a quality course was that the clubs that Ritchie rented broke quickly. The first time he used his driver it broke! It was his only wood. He had to use irons the rest of the game. This was only at the second or third hole. The pic on the left is Christopher with the shaft of the headless club. The pic on the right is Ritchie with the head of the golf club.
As I said before the greens weren't green at all. They were just sand traps in disguise. The pic below shows a typical green that you will find at this course. Two or three of the greens had weeds growing out of the sand, but they were really just obstacles anyway.
This last pic is of Ritchie looking around in the grass. This was pretty much all we did. We lost golf balls on every hole. And it's not because we suck that bad, it's the bad job that the staff does maintaining the golf course. We probably spent more time looking for golf balls than we did playing golf. seriously.
Just before we left we deciced to play a bit of frisbee. We're going to form our own international team someday. We're just that good :P Christopher took the two frisbee action photos on the right.
Overall it was a great trip. Even though the golf course had a lot of problems it was very amusing, which in the end provided a fun time.