Today is the last day for my intern at work, Matt. He's been a great help on a lot of my projects, so it was a bummer to see him go. I took him out to lunch at Hoagie's for a going away. Unfortunately, he was supposed to be an intern for the whole mill, but no one else took much of an interest in him and I don't think he got everything out of it that he could have. There is only so much time I could give him, but no one else took advantage.

On our way to Hoagie's, I noticed a sign in front of The Great Outdoors stating that they were having a sale on kayaks for 15% off. Jaime has been saving her money and wanted to get us kayaks for our 30th birthday this summer. I was really excited about that when I found out about her plan, so I have been doing a lot of research on them lately and looking forward to it. We didn't really know where to go to get our kayaks. We had heard there was a place down in Lyndonville and a place in Stowe, but we didn't think to look locally for some reason. I had never thought of The Great Outdoors. So we decided to walk down there and check them out after work since it was nice outside.

I wasn't expecting too much, but to my surprise the sales guy in the store was very knowledgeable about all their kayaks and the accessories and such. He also seemed interested in saving us money too, which I thought was good. He wasn't trying to sell us up to stuff we didn't need. Anyway, after pricing them around, and taking his recommendations into consideration, I think we will probably get our kayaks from them. It is good to shop locally too. It seems like a good deal because it is 15% off for the first one and 20% off for the second one, and 15% off any accessories we get at the same time (paddles, life jackets, thingies to put on roof of car, fishing rod holder). I think we are going to go with the Old Town Canoe Dirigo 106 Kayak.

I think this will suit our needs. I wanted a kayak that would be good for fishing, and also somewhat a beginner level kayak, but with a lot of storage space. Also, these are fairly short in length, so they should be light and easy to transport. There was also an "Angler" addition that already came with the rod holder and an anchor, but he said that it was like $100 more and you could add those things separately for less money. We can both get the same one this way too, because they should be good for just paddling around recreationally.

The sale ends in a few days, so we need to make a decision on this now, instead of waiting until our birthdays. Which is good anyway, because we can use them once the ice is off the lake and it warms up a bit and not have to wait until almost July. So I think I am going to go down there on Wednesday and close the deal. Probably the only drawback is that unless we had a roof rack on our cars (which we don't), we can't put them both on the roof at the same time, unless we wanted to invest in a roof rack. So if we want to go somewhere, we need to take both cars. If we were to go down a river, we might need to do that anyway, so we could leave a vehicle the end of the trip to pick up our stuff.

So, I am pretty psyched!

We had Julie and Travis over last night for dinner. Travis brought some coconut shrimp for Jaime and Julie, and he and I had some bourbon steaks. We played Canasta after dinner. Travis and I whomped Jaime and Julie. That is probably a good thing because that will stir up Julie's competitive streak and she will want to play more to try to beat us. I got a Canasta card set at Pick and Shovel after driving all over the place looking for one. It is not the same as Mom's.

Saturday night we went to Bob and Lori's for dinner (I know, we must be popular or something). They showed us their pictures from their trip to Greece and Italy and Bob made a really good dinner. It was a good time.