Thanksgiving in Buchanan

Its good to be home.  Going to Ruukki was about a 24 hour adventure but coming home was a 36 hour ordeal.  I left my hovel at MTT around 4:00 Friday morning their time which was really 7:00 Thursday evening. (to avoid further confusion all of the rest of the times will be real time)   My flight from Oulu to Helsinki left at 10:00 PM and arrived an hour later.  Then I sat around the Helsinki airport until 5:00 AM Friday morning waiting for my flight to London. 

I think Heathrow is a perpetual fuckup.  I used to think Toronto was the worst airport in the world but Heathrow changed all that.  Once they got us loaded in the tin can at Helsinki the pilot announced that we would get to sit at the gate for at least half an hour because he couldn’t get us a landing slot at Heathrow.  Apparently he couldn’t have figured that out before they loaded us.  Then when we got close to Heathrow we went into a holding pattern circling closer to the airport until we finally landed.  We went through the same nonsense on the way over but at that point I thought it might be an isolated incident.

Once we landed we were subjected to some bizarre British security BS.  At one point they had us in line and they were stopping the line every 10 or 12 passengers to give us a canned lecture about how we couldn’t bring liquids through security.  The clowns giving the lecture seemed to believe that none of us had ever been through security screening ever before.  I (and many others in line) couldn’t help wondering how they thought we had arrived in that particular line between customs and re-screening.  I think we were supposed to leave there about 11:00 AM Friday and of course they loaded us before admitting that we couldn’t leave on time.  It was after noon before we finally got airborne but we made good time.  On the way home we came much further south – more or less over Labrador, arriving in Calgary with a bit of time to spare for my Westjet connection back to Saskatoon. 

When I cleared Canadian customs in Calgary I had a young guy who said “Oh, I was in Finland twice” to which I responded “why the hell would you ever go more than once?”  He agreed with my assessment and then asked if I had any booze to declare.  I had a bottle of some kind of brandy that they had given me before I left.  The customs guy then went off on a rant about Finnish booze before he welcomed me back to Canada. 

When I checked my bag in Helsinki they tagged it for Saskatoon but only gave me a boarding pass as far as Calgary.  Fortunately Westjet has a baggage counter just inside security so that wasn’t any big hassle.  And after enduring Heathrow security the Calgary flavour wasn’t so distasteful.

We spent Saturday in Saskatoon running errands and visiting Aunt Norma in St. Paul’s Hospital.  She was doing a lot better than we expected and I wouldn’t be surprised if she is home by now. 

We need to find a dishwasher for Marilyn’s new house & I’d like to find a good recliner so we spent some time looking for them.  We eventually struck out on both counts and came home to spend Thanksgiving in Buchanan.  I don’t remember a fall where there was such a variation in the tree colours.  We have trees in the yard that have completely lost their leaves and trees whose leaves are still green. 

This afternoon I went for a drive and took some photos for Marilyn’s project.  There’s still a little bit of harvest left to wrap up around Buchanan but its getting real hard to find crop left out.  I did find a truck line-up at the Pioneer elevator in Canora that brought back memories.  I can remember sitting in line-ups when the elevator “got cars”.  The line-ups looked similar but the trucks are a lot bigger now.  The elevators are a lot bigger too – and a lot farther apart.