poplar road

Why would anyone spend one’s precious vacation hours camped out in somebody’s back yard? That’s the question that seemed to come up a few times in the past month, as we began extending our annual invitation to our long weekend “UNniversary” campout to new guests both from the coast and locally. Certainly as I was trying to paint a picture of the weekend for my colleagues at my new job on campus, the expressions of puzzlement on their faces made me look at our UNEvents with fresh eyes.

When I was a child, camping meant stuffing our old VW pop-top van with all our vacation supplies and catching some sleep at barely-remembered campgrounds on our way across the country from Vancouver to Winnipeg to spend summers with my grandparents. I only have vague memories of actually pitching a tent in the woods somewhere, but I still treasure one night as a girl at my best friend’s house, when a casual sleepover was transformed by putting up the family’s cavernous manila-yellow canvas tent on the back lawn. Our whispers and stash of brightly coloured candy were interrupted by a typical North Vancouver downpour in the middle of the night that sent us dashing inside, leaving the tent to record the hilarity in sticky rainbow-coloured splotches on the floor.

You can have adventures in your own back yard, and wonderful moments of laughter, excitement and true relaxation that keep you going when you return to the daily grind. That’s what we try to create with our UNEvents, something more than just a backyard barbecue on a sunny long weekend. It may look like an overblown backyard food fest from the photos, but I for one felt like I packed a year full of visits into those three short days that phone calls and the odd dinner get-together just can’t achieve.

I made more of an effort at recording our UNniversary with the camera this year, and I know many of our guests did too (many thanks especially to Bob, who quickly showed me a few essential features of my own camera!). It may take me some time to pick out the best and share them here, but before the march of images begins, I wanted to say how much Richard and I love sharing this weekend with everyone, how happy we are at how well it went this year and how grateful we are that so many of you spent long hours in your cars to spend the weekend camped out in our weedy, sun-baked, work-in-progress back yard, despite extreme heat and holiday traffic and other challenges. You are a wonderful group of people, and if we could pull off this event once in every season, instead of once a year, just to see you more often, we would!

Watching the three little girls, Anika, Olivia, and Daneaya, (and their mischievous little brothers, too) playing together so well, I remembered many times as a kid when I’d meet my parents’ friends and their kids at their homes across the province, many seen only once a year at most, and think how vivid the memories of those children and places still are, and in the background of those visions, how happy my parents were to see their far-flung friends again, if only briefly. I find it hard to express how I feel to see the same patterns again, only expanded so that our friends and their children are becoming friends with each other on this one weekend a year. It’s kind of a nostalgia for the future, isn’t it, to look forward to many UNEvents for years to come, with old friends and new ones. Thanks and big hugs to all of you who shared the weekend with us, a resounding “we missed you” to those who couldn’t make it, and don’t forget to put us on your calendar for next year! We’ll be here.