A Saskatoon Reunion

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

START:  King's Acres Campground, Regina, SK - 11:00 a.m.

STOP:  Saskatoon RV Park, Saskatoon, SK - 5:45 p.m.

WEATHER:  Humid and sunny to overcast and seveeere thunderstormage

DAD FOUND HIS GLASSES!  He had left them in the office when he went to get a site at the campground yesterday morning.  You can all rest easy tonight since I know you didn't get much sleep last night wondering how it was all gonna turn out.

So our plan for today was to head towards Saskatoon so Mom could hopefully meet her friend Shelley FINALLY after over 10 years of friendship over the interwebz.  The story is that Shelley somehow kept getting random emails from Mom containing Dad's resume, even after Mom deleted it, so they decided that she either had to find Dad a job or they should probably just become friends.  Seeing as Shelley had no job prospects for Dad at the time, there was only one option left.  So we arrived in Saskatoon around 2 p.m. with me trying to map out our route and relay it to Dad in some kind of coherent fashion, as per the uuuusual these days.  With the hot laptop sitting on my legs and the sun beating down on me through the windshield, an hour later we still had not tracked down Shelley's location and had found ourselves in a Wal-Mart parking lot after having driven down yet another boondog road for a swell 20 minutes.  Mom called Shelley in hopes of having her guide us out of the mess we were in, but even she had no idea where we were, so I brought all of my fury with me into Wal-Mart and asked the greeter where on God's good Earth we were and eventually discovered we were only a five minute drive from where Shelley was at work.  At roughly 3:05 p.m. we pulled up in front of the school where Shelley works and her and Mom did their own version of a slow-mo run through the cornfields (across the road) towards each other, just happy to finally be meeting in person after all this time.  The fact that she was probably the nicest and sweetest woman that all of us had ever met definitely eliminated any prior frustration that was brewing only moments before in trying to track her down.  She came out and sat in Beula to chat and catch up for about 40 minutes before it was time for her to head back to work and for her and Mom to say their goodbyes after a quick photo shoot in front of Beuls.  It was a great visit and not only Mom but all of us were happy to have finally met the woman we'd heard so much about after all these years!

After that, it was time to find our way back to the highway and head out of town.  Beula's ability to merge is always a memorable experience.  Dad:  "All right boys, better start fading or we're all gonna end up in the fuckin' rhubarb!"  Hahaha.  (I hear that one's for you, Bob!)  Unfortunately, the weather took a turn for the worse and it looked like a pretty nasty storm was brewin' on the horizon so we stopped to grab gas and some Subway before figuring out our plan of action.  Mom:  "You don't want chipotle sauce?"  Mike:  "If you get that, you're gonna have to change your pants."  Dad:  "Oh, yeah.  Forget it.  Don't get that."  Hahaha, what? Bad memory, Pops?  Mike also discovered that the rectangular couch pillows unzipped and proceeded to take a sniff inside, prompting Mom to yell out, "Aw, don't smell that!  There's years of farts in there!"  Mike: "Pfft, people don't fart into the side things."  Good lord, classy bunch we is.

We eventually decided to keep driving and see how far we could get before being twistered off the highway by the storm, but roughly 10 minutes out of town it got to be more than we were willing to bear, so we pulled into a truck inspection station to wait it out for a few minutes (and also discovered that Big Beuls weighs about 14,938lbs.)  Dad eventually made the call to turn back around and head to the RV park we had just passed and call it a night, as the rain didn't seem to be letting up any time soon.  So we settled into our muddy site and Dad ran outside barefoot to plug us in and that was that.

Here's hoping Mother Nature take all her dumps overnight and let's us get outta here in the morning.

Letting the good times roll,