Day 65 - Oakville - Thanksgiving dinner 1 - Saturday 9th October

Today was the first day of the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. Traditionally families get together for a turkey dinner. It's also known as the "dumping weekend". College and university students come home for the first time since they started. By now they have realised that the world is their oyster and they "dump" their high school girlfriend/boyfriend. That's what we were told.

Apparently (there are quite a few versions of this that we have heard) the early settlers invited the local indians into their home for dinner!? Or the local indians saw how the new settlers were faring (badly) and came and offered them food. These days it is more of a harvest festival type of celebration. It has no religious associations.

Sammy, who you may have read about yesterday, was invited to play at his friend's house. This resulted in the boy (Vito) asking Sammy to come to watch him play ice hockey today. So we all went along and watched 3 aside junior ice hockey (photos above). This resulted in another invitation for Sammy to go and play again this afternoon (I think the boys are in love). Dropping Sammy off this afternoon resulted in a further invitation to join them for a Thanksgiving meal tonight. So we all went and joined Vito, his Mum and her partner, her Mum and her Mum's Dad. That is 4 generations. Bill (Vito's great grandad) is 92 and still as bright as a button. He was a Doctor of Philosophy who studied at the Sorbonne and at Yale. Very interesting man. He has some stories to tell.

We had a great dinner. Applie pie desert and great company. They also had their next door neighbours in, who had 2 young boys. So we had 5 boys running around. Actually they were quite well behaved.

What a great day. We loafed around in the morning, got a great lunch for less than £11 for all of us, went to a hockey match and had a great evening.