The holiday stretched out endlessly in a string of days yet to be unravelled.
No plans!
But, suddenly, before I knew it, no plans evolved into a plan and that plan turned into a road trip and the road trip turned into a trip with friends to Saskatchewan, of all places.
Going on a road trip with friends turned out to be a great plan and as we travelled along the great expanse of roadways and highways we brought with us a certain sense of fun, excitement and challenge.
One of us happened to be from Saskatchewan. Two of us had been there lots and the other one had never been there.
“I’ve never been there,” he confessed the other day, much to our amusement. He was, in fact, quite a world traveller and had been to some foreign sounding places that some of us had trouble even pronouncing, but apparently, he had never turned his wheels east to visit our neighbouring province.
Our other friend was from Saskatchewan and had many fond memories of her childhood and the little town she grew up in. When she chatted about those days of long ago, she would get a faraway look in her eyes and it seemed like in her mind, she was back there again, young, happy and carefree as the prairie wind.
As for me and my husband, we are Alberta children, born and raised and we are used to the boom and bust economy, of oil rigs and oil spills and governments that giveth and taketh away with equal aplomb.
We feel easy and happy here, the land of wild roses and majestic Rocky Mountains and quiet country roads and bustling cities and rural towns dotted here there and everywhere and gas prices that are just wrong somehow.
And, one night when we were all sitting around just being us, someone, (I think it was me) said “we should go to Saskatchewan.”
As, rather to my surprise, they all agreed.
“Yes, let’s go. A road trip.”
The road trip turned out to be an adventure in itself. Two of us got lost. Two of us couldn’t find those two. And all of us couldn’t find the owl on the fence post that marked the very long driveway leading to the house of the man we were coming to visit. And all of us discovered the distance between Alberta and Saskatchewan can be very long, indeed.
But, in the end it was so worth it.
And we discovered, once again, that it’s not where you’re from that really matters at all. It’s who you’re with that counts. A road trip without friends would be very boring, indeed. But, a road trip with friends is an entirely different story. And having someone to visit at the end of the road trip makes it even better.
And as we settle down for a nice long visit in the land of the living skies I can’t help but think of a line in the movie about Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin.
“What day is it Christopher?” Pooh asks his friend.
“It’s today, Pooh,” Christopher replies.
“Oh, my favourite day,” Pooh says.
Treena Mielke is the editor of the Rimbey Review. She lives in Sylvan Lake.