Travellin Man

So thursday afternoon I am sitting in my office and I call uhaul. We are loading up our house on friday and I want to make sure that we have a truck to load. Yes of course you have a truck they say, it is located in Slave Lake. For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of northern Alberta Slave Lake is about 2 1/2 hours north of Whitecourt. I became somewhat irate with the woman from uhaul but I got the sense that I was not the first angry customer she had dealt with that day or even in the last 10 minutes, the truck was in Slave Lake did I want it? Of course I did.

Early friday morning Jen and I set out for Slave Lake. Anyone who is reading this blog know that Jen is smoking hot. What you may not be aware of is that she is also an amazing conversationalist so the trip at least on the way to Slave Lake flew by. We got to Slave Lake we picked up the truck and started driving. Now all of you assume that I drove the truck right? I consider myself a fairly evolved guy. I used to own a pink dress shirt, I try to say firefighter and police officer and I don't call it babysitting when I watch my own kids, so you would think that there would at least be a discussion about who drove the truck but no I just hopped up in to the cab and started driving. Maybe Jenie wanted to drive that 26 foot behemoth down that foul road between Slave Lake and Swan Hills, we will never know because I am the man and apparently that means I drive the gigantic moving truck.

While I was on the the road I had the pleasure of listening to several rural radio stations. Those of you who have not had this pleasure are probably unaware of the sheer variety played on these stations. In an urban setting you have your top 40, rock, classic rock, dance etc. In Slave Lake you have all of those in one. As an example they played Neil Young and then the new one by Miley Cyrus. No. Joke. It was like they sat around at the station with everyone in the break room and said okay what is the most unlikely combination of songs that we can play next to each other. One guy says the beattles and britney spears ( a couple of laughs) the next dude says Nirvana and In Sync (booing mostly for In Sync) then the intern at the back with the faux hawk and the soul tip says Neil Young and Miley Cyrus (everyone leaves the room because it is perfect and seriously a faux hawk?).

Then we loaded the truck up at this point I have to stop and say Jason, Renee, Pierre thanks so much for the lifting and the working and thank you Monique for sitting on the front stoop and directing traffic with that gigantic belly. Without you Gary and I would have been loading that truck for hours. Leaving Whitecourt was much harder than I thought it would be. I mean its Whitecourt I never wanted to go there in the first place. But now I am leaving and I realize that I made some really good friends. That is not something I do a lot. I don't have a tonne (metric) of friends mostly becuase I have a pretty high standard for what I consider friendship. As an example, If I was being held in a Mexican prison on trumped up heroin smuggling charges who would I call? Could I call you? If you are my friend I could. You would come down see if you could bribe a guard, break open a window or at least get me a good lawyer and some decent american food, they are killing me with all these tacos, just killing me. That my friend is friendship and I made some real friends in Whitecourt, I am sad to leave them.

Also thanks to my mom she spent 12 hours on a bus to help pack up my house and clean it. If it was not for her I would be going back to the pig sty I deserve rather than the vision of cleanliness that she has created. You are the best mom. and Dawn you took three of my kids for the past week (the loudest and whiniest three at that) and are letting me live in your house, thank you. I take back all of the terrible things I said to you as teenagers and also the things I just thought and didn't say, you are none of the things that I said or thought, you are a great sister and possibly a saint (but only if you go Catholic, we don't do that.)

Finally to Gary. You are the rain man of packing moving vans, If you had told me we would have fit all of that crap (ya most of its crap but its our crap and its mostly paid for) into that van I would not have believed you. Then you kept me company all the way down south from about 30 feet behind my truck, helped me unload it and now I am currently living in your house. Above and beyond man, above and beyond.

So here we are in Raymond living in my sisters basement. This should be interesting. I probably will not keep you posted.