My first blended family experience was really at the Cape Breton coal mines. We were all sitting there waiting dutifully for our tour guide. I am not much of a tour guide kind of person and this was probably pretty obvious that day. I was with Chris, Abby and Allyson (formerly known as Ally and now really known only as Al to me but I will be formal this once.)

So Mr. Tour Guide needs to break the ice with our group and starts doing the go around and asking us where we are all from. Now, you need to know, we look like a family, we are a family but we are no ordinary family. It is too late to get our story straight and I am freaking out about this as he already knows that we are from PEI sort of and NB sort of so it is really hard to change our story on the fly. When he comes around, we give it a go and say we are from NS instead only to have him quiz us about our particulars. In fact at that time Chris was from NS, I was from PEI and the girls were from NB.

To an outsider, we looked completely dysfunctional and it appeared that the girls were parenting themselves since the “parents” didn’t even live in the same province either.

To make matters worse, we entered the coal mine only to have one of our mining helmets fall off and roll down the ramp, making a lot of noise as Mr. Tour Guide was giving his spiel. Well… I was toast… once I started laughing… I couldn’t even stop which of course made us look even more dysfunctional.

Barely surviving this experience, we of course felt bad that Jade hadn’t been able to come, so later on Chris and I took her back.

This is what you do as a blended family… you keep on doing stuff until everyone has had the chance to do it!

Of course this also reminds me of my lovely planning of our cave visit in Guatemala, which Jade just reminded me was her least favourite place on our trip. Oops, I recall her mentioning this… this had been majorly hyped up as a huge deal on Trip Advisor so of course, we had to do it – the royal “we” of course.

Did these other people on Trip Advisor go to the same cave as Jade and Chris did???

Did they actually walk through the sludge, the mud, the wet, the jungle, the ” I am sure there are snakes in this grass” stuff as Jade and Chris did?

Because if they did, kudos to them for ranking it high on their lists because I was most definitely informed that this was NOT high on the Jade/Chris list.

Apparently the guide spoke no English, walked incredibly fast and Jade and Chris thought they might either lose their boots in the mud, die of thirst, or kill me when they got back.

Luckily none of those happened.

In fact inside the cave, Chris held a candle (complete with wax dripping onto his hands) while Jade horrified, noticed a huge spider almost going across her rubber boot. I guess there were some pretty stalagmites and other cave like stuff… but this is not what they remember today.