Blue Plastic and Bugs

We took an unplanned trip to Ventspils last Saturday. Kelly was going to just take the boys to a marsh and walk around in the park while I rested with Isabel. I had a cold and felt pretty bad, but as they were getting ready to leave, I looked out the window and saw what a beautiful day it was. I have to mention that I was able to finally look out our front 5 windows and balcony last Saturday because for the past month our windows have had blue plastic over them. They are redoing the front of our building. They built scaffolding up the entire front and over all around our very small balcony. So the boys, for a while, had great entertainment while they watched the workers fix the outside. We had to make sure we were not walking around in our underwear since the workers were right there. But after a few weeks of that, they put blue plastic over all our windows and closed us in for the next 4 weeks. So sad to be closed in during the summer. It was worse when it rained since it seemed so dark in our house. A couple of Saturday's ago, Kelly and I got the kids ready and our big stroller and both bikes for the kids all downstairs and outside and then found out it was raining. We were pretty bummed, but decided since we went through all the effort, we would go to the park anyway. This was a park farther away with an awesome playground. I wanted to run there while Kelly watched the kids. It actually turned out quite nice, only raining a little. It turned out that at that park they were having a Latvian cheese festival, so after our runs, we checked out the typical Latvian festival, with shashliks (shishkabobs), cheese, fried potatoes and pickles. They also had a few ladies brewing big pots of soup over a fire on the grass. We wanted to get some soup, but it wasn't done yet. We left about 10 mins too late, because on the way back we got poured on. Luckily I have a great rain cover for Isabel. I don't have any pictures of the festival, but it was fun.

Back to Ventspils, so as the workers were taking the blue plastic off our windows I decided I couldn't just sit home on such a beautiful day, especially since we had a pretty raining month of June. So I got Isabel all ready and we took off with the boys. We went to this nature park where you can walk on these boards/planks for about a mile and a half across this marshy wetland. In the middle of the wetland, there is a tower you can climb up and see the nature park. It sounded really cool. Sadly, when we drove up there was a big sign saying it was dangerous to visitors so we couldn't do it. We were tempted to go anyway, because they hadn't closed it off or anything, just put up a big sign, but we had to remember that it had to be pretty dangerous in order to close it in Latvia. So we walked around a little and went back. We had an interesting time getting out of the car, Kelly was freaking out because the car was being surrounded by tons of bug, flies, mosquitoes, and other yucky things. He was staying away from the car but leaving us all in the car. He finally came to get us and we let tons of bugs in our car, they were swarming us. So we quickly ran away from the car and walked to find the beginning of the marsh. We were all attacked by tons of mosquitoes and decided it was better to visit the place in the fall anyway, so hopefully they fix it by then. Here are some pictures of Kelly walking on the beginning of the marsh and the beautiful forest with tons of bugs.