Welcome to 2011. So how was your holiday? As usual when Roy and recreation are in the same sentence ours was not uneventful.
It started out easily enough. Fly to Kelowna, rent a car, drive to Penticton and spend time with my son and his family in OK Falls, so far, so good.
The first small fly in the ointment was the wracking cough my grandson had received as an early Christmas present from one of his classmates. That meant no swimming in the hotel's pool for him. But Logan could still have his sleepover with Grandma and Papa, so all was not lost.
Christmas Eve meant a trip to a couple of the big box stores just to confirm that his "I lish list" (his uncle's mangle for wish list back in the day) was indeed correct. After realizing Papa meant business when he declared that any pre-present must be small enough to fit in Logan's pocket and not be an instrument of destruction of any kind, the boy and I returned to the hotel to wile away the hours until the Santa hour.
In the meantime Papa, being a typical male, struck out to do his important Christmas shopping.
After four hours of no hubby I was beginning to think that either the merry elf had been abducted by aliens or some other dire calamity had befallen him.
As it turned out I was right. At 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve I got the great news - Wayne was fine by his wallet was missing in action.
After buying the all-important present -namely mine, he had gone to a local garage to get a coffee and discovered no billfold. If ever you want to find a big way to suck the joy out of any holiday, that's it.
After retracing his steps to no avail, he did the only thing possible; he filed a missing wallet report with the local RCMP then came back to the hotel to give me the good news. Needless to say jolly was not part of my demeanour for the next hour.
Visions of stolen IDs and thousands of dollars of credit card fraud replaced visions of sugarplums in my holiday brain. When shortly thereafter came a miracle call. The RCMP called to let Wayne know that they had received a call from a Rob Roy, who as luck would have it is Wayne's cousin, with news of the missing wallet.
It turned out that an elderly lady had found the wallet in the parking lot exactly where it had popped out of Wayne's pocket when he set it on top of my gift to disguise the present from my prying eyes. As luck would have it the woman instead of calling the police or our Gibsons' telephone number proceeded to call all the Roys in the Penticton phone book. Fortunately Rob's was at the top of the list.
So there it was -our double Christmas miracle - the return of the wandering wallet and a reconnect with a relative we didn't even know was living in the area.
And who said there's no Santa Claus, there really is, and his last name is Roy.
