Well its been a while hasn’t it? What can I say – we’ve been busy.
We left Saskatoon and went down to a regional park just outside Weyburn for a couple of days. Then we headed west and stayed a couple more nights in another obscure regional park which is more or less inside what remains of the village of Ponteix. I cleaned up a bunch of my Palliser files along the way and Marilyn kept grinding away at the video script for Ag in the Classroom.
We went out in the Exploder one night trying to find some photos or video footage for the AITC project and ended up having an inadvertent adventure. We had been out for a couple of hours and it was getting close to sundown when we spotted a spray plane working about 5 miles NE of Ponteix. We sat on a side road for a while watching the plane work until we got bored. Rather than drive under his flight path I started to turn around at which point I realized that we had a flat tire. Then we discovered that last fall when we cleaned the truck up to sell it we took the jack out of it and evidently never got around to putting it back in. I was able to get the spare down from the stupid location up under the box but of course without a jack there was no way I was going any further.
Marilyn walked about a half mile south to a yard that turned out to be vacant while I was messing with the spare tire. When she got back she said there was a shop in the yard so I walked back to see if I could steal a jack. I found a jack and walked back to the truck. By that time it was getting dark so when I discovered that the wheel bolts were so tight that I couldn’t loosen them with my crossarm wrench and ended up walking back to the farmyard a second time it was pitch black out. Of course that meant I had to turn the lights on in the shop to find a wrench and the lights attracted the owner of the yard who happened to be out looking at crops. That turned out better than it could have and I ended up getting a ride back to the truck plus some assistance changing the tire, including headlights to light up the work.
The next morning we hooked up and headed further west, to Airdrie this time. Marilyn, Alison and Donna had cooked up a girlfriend weekend and the respective husbands were welcome to come along as long as we stayed out of the way. Which we did. We also drank a lot of beer and had a picnic in Banff. Then we headed back to Saskatoon so that I could catch a plane to Maryland. Which is where I am right now.
Due to circumstances completely under my client’s control I ended up being here longer than I had intended. This morning I woke up with nothing to do other than wait until my parts show up tomorrow. So after eating breakfast at Bob Evans restaurant I caught the subway into DC. I didn’t really go anywhere in particular – I just kind of wandered around. There’s a few cities that I have visited where I’m perfectly happy to just wander aimlessly – Washington DC and New York are at the top of that list and there’s probably a couple more if I thought about it for a while. I also ate some expensive seafood in a marginally decent restaurant.
Tomorrow – if I’m lucky – UPS will arrive with the missing parts and I’ll get everything wrapped up so I can leave in good time on Tuesday. Alternatively the parts won’t arrive until Tuesday morning in which case I’ll leave around noon in a panic. Either way I’ll be home Tuesday night.
No comments:
Post a Comment