Here we are in the last weeks of June… Summer has officially arrived, school is out for the season, the days grow a little more lazy and for the second year in a row I continue partaking in my daily blogging exercise, marginally focused along a question-and-answer theme I’ve simply called Those 30 posts in June. Still no planning. Still no writing of these words days in advance. Still just this: each day a meanderingly vague prompt drives a meanderingly vague post… and today that post just happens to be:

June 25th // Something You Want To Taste

Apparently I’ve ill-timed my holidays this year.

Karin and I coordinate our lives a few weeks ago and planned out some summer break time in the soon-to-be July warmth. The notion was that even if it turned into a week of stay-cation and we didn’t make it out of the city, we could pepper that one glorious week with some local family fun-times and — at the very least — have some quality time with Claire.

It was a good plan. It still is. There is just one glitch…

It turns out that one of my favorite downtown festivals is running concurrently with our planned vacation time. Taste of Edmonton the “dazzling array of tastes and sounds that fill Churchill Square” each summer, is nothing short of an epic, outdoor, downtown food fair that feeds the masses with (slightly) over-priced — but exceedingly delicious — fare from close to what seems like a hundred local restaurants. Usually — or last summer and one of the highlights of now working downtown — this festival is a hop, skip and a jump from my office. I could cavort through the food stalls, pick from an array of tasty and delicious mini-meals, and savour the summer with something more interesting than the standard food fair fare.

But now? Nine of those ten days coincide directly with the days I was planning on specifically NOT going downtown. Nine of those ten days the festival — while not out of reach — is not as convenient as I’d been anticipating.

So… perhaps a plan? When life tosses you lemons — as the saying (sorta) goes — make a delicious frozen lemonade beverage treat. Assuming we don’t disappear from town for too many of those hot July days, I’m thinking we might just need to take this opportunity to make a family-focused trip downtown. Transit? Driving? Who cares. We’ve got no where else to be. We need to pick a nice sunny day. We need to let Claire wear her swimsuit so she can frolick in the City Hall fountain. We need to buy a heaping wad of food tickets. And we need to have a family food-cation… an afternoon of tastes, as it were.

And that’s what I want to taste this summer.