Measuring summer by the cup

I know summer isn’t really over yet, but I’m back at work now and my holidays are over. Even though it’s a little less than a month until the boys go back to school, Beloved’s holidays are also more or less over after next week. So, even though there is plenty left of the summer of ’10 to enjoy, I’m feeling retrospective about it already.

It has been, by just about any measure, an amazing summer for us. In the month of July alone, the boys swam in an ocean, a Great Lake, an inland freshwater lake, a river and a pool. How awesome is that? That alone has to qualify as some sort of excellence-in-vacationing milestone!

We did a *lot* of traveling this summer — the big trip out to Nova Scotia, a slightly less epic loop around Southern Ontario to visit two sides of the family, and lots of little day trips. Oh how I love a good road trip! And to their credit, the boys only twitch a little bit when they see me loading up the car again.

And so, if swimming in salt- and fresh-water bodies isn’t your idea of a good time, here’s another way to measure excellence in summer vacations: how many Tim Hortons did you visit?

In the great summer of 2010 road-trips, aside from my usual Barrhaven and west-Ottawa Tims locations, we bought coffees and mocha iced-capps in:

• Drummondville, QC
• Grand Sault, NB
• Moncton, NB
• Halifax, NS
• Lunenburg, NS
• Bridgewater, NS
• Saint John, NB
• Bristol, NB
• Lévis, QC
• Morrisburg, ON
• Trenton, ON
• Georgetown, ON
• Aberfoyle, ON
• Clinton, ON
• Angus, ON
• Hunstville, ON
• Renfrew, ON

Phew, that’s a lot of coffee! I wish I had some sort of passport so I could have collected stamps from all of them. What, too obsessive? I swear, I only used this map to roughly locate a few for our trip out east! (For the southern Ontario loop, I used an app for my iPhone. Um, yeah, maybe just a weensy bit addicted. But if you love Tims, it rocks!!)

So, apparently in addition to a lot of swimming, we drank a lot of coffee this summer. *blush*

How ’bout you? What’s your measure of a summer well spent?

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