It is early Saturday morning and I’m typing into my phone from my bed in a hotel with two cups of semi-decent coffee in me.

We’re in Niagara Falls, the teen girl and I, at the much anticipated annual ringette tournament. They predicted an apocalyptic snow storm for the weekend, so we prepared the car by topping up the fluids, added a small snow shovel into the trunk, and left before nary a flake fell from the sky.

Fast forward through game 1 (7-4 win!), hotel check-in (a little bit of drama at our room door), pizza and snacks in the windowless basement party room and a sudden strong and annoying emergence of a sinus cold when finally, I looked out of the fourth floor window to check on the storm.

Well I guess you could say it was snowing… But it sure didn’t look like all the hoopla they anticipated.

This is the result of the storm the next morning that has now moved eastward:

Not exactly the predicted apocalypse.

I think we’ll survive just fine. 🙄

As mentioned, I’m typing this from my bed. The girl child is still sleeping. She played cards with her teammates last night after pizza, and they went into the pool an hour later to swim. With the earlier very fun ringette game, I bet she’s tired… So I will do my thing this morning while she rests up for the next game, which will happen in the next town over in Chippawa at 6 pm.

My thing includes a 9 minute walk to the local drug store to buy a box of tissue that doesn’t feel like sandpaper. The cold winter air will do me good. I might also pick up some stronger meds for sleeping.

This cold is not really affecting me during the day when I’m upright. It hits me like a ton of bricks in the evening though… I’m a little concerned because one of the moms with two girls in ringette is double booked in two different tournaments, and she asked me if her daughter could stay over at our hotel room tonight since we play early Sunday morning and the other daughter doesn’t (so they’re checking out not having anticipated a round robin game on Sunday which is very unusual – Sundays are usually reserved for playoff games only). I texted her about my cold so she can decide whether to still go ahead with the sleepover.

The drama at the door at check-in time was minor but a little bit funny in hindsight. We got our key cards and my daughter, a seasoned away-tournament traveler, pointed to the number the receptionist scribbled onto the paper which also included the wifi password.

Room 405.

The keys didn’t work. The little lights on the door lock went orange and red, but not green.

Sonja tried and tried again until finally I asked to see the paper. I didn’t have my reading glasses on but I took a guess that the last number was a 9, not a 5.

We wandered over to room 409, tried the key, and it worked. 😀

I like this hotel. It’s newly renovated, minimalist with quite spacious rooms. Comfortable (except for the sandpaper tissues).

So that’s the first part of the mother-daughter away tournament adventures. Thank you for stopping by my blog. Stay tuned for more later.

By the way, is everyone on Jetpack now? While using mobile? WP managed to transfer everything from the mobile app to Jetpack without any glitches (so far), so for me, right now, things are fine. Fingers crossed it stays this way.