Well our big trip for the summer has come and gone. We had been planning to go to Ireland for a while, but that dream circled down the drain when we got invited to a wedding in Saskatoon, the world’s least glamourous location. We drove there in two days, mostly using GPS which took us a direct route across the prairies but one that, sometimes alarmingly, took us down empty dirt roads where we saw nary a soul or building for hours. We found our way to the Yellowhead Highway almost by accident, and thus did we arrive in Saskatoon having finally found food and gas along the way.
The wedding was in a beautiful Catholic church, and the ceremony was very nice and not too long. I am a little grumpy with the Catholic church in general, you know, with school yards full of buried kids and all. Anyway, I found the proceedings a little churchy, but the bride’s family is a pretty churchy bunch by the look of things. Then we set aside the bible readings and got drunk and silly. We went back to our Airbnb and I managed to tumble my drunken ass backwards into a small bathtub. I thought at first I may have broken a bone in my back, but a couple days later it started feeling better – a sure sign it was only a darn good bruise. Dorth woke up the next morning sick. She didn’t drink at the reception, and although I drank enough for both of us, I felt fine. She sprawled out on the couch and watched renovation shows on TV for about 14 hours, in what may have been the dullest day of my adult life.
We were going to go to Winnipeg the next day but El Sicko wasn’t up for the drive, so we settled for the much shorter drive to Regina. It was quiet in town and our hotel was full of Hell’s Angels. Our main piss off was the hotel in Winnipeg wasn’t answering our calls and we wound up paying for the room anyway. We had dinner in a Chinese buffet and everybody was obese, waddling to and fro with heaping plates. I felt like an Olympic athlete in there.
The next day we drove to see her cousins who live in a place so remote it doesn’t have an address. He is a farmer and flies a crop duster plane in low passes over fields for money. His wife has problems with her immune system, and because Dorth had been sick we kept outside mostly, and tried to stay apart as much as politely possible. We left there and drove to Estevan. We got a tiny room in a hotel and went out to see the sights. It was a nice town, and we went for a walk in a park on a hill with a nice view of the coal fired electrical plant. They tell me the plant produces virtually zero emissions and that we should be exporting that technology abroad for the good of the world, along with the coal to make it go.
Next morning we started the long road home by heading for Swift Current. We hadn’t got too far when Dorth got the call to tell her a girl we sat with at the wedding had Covid. Luckily we had taken precautions with the immune compromised wife of her cousin, so she never wound up getting sick. When we got to Swift Current I ran into City Hall and grabbed us a couple Covid test kits. Dorth was positive and I was negative, despite being within an umbilical cord length of her for days. Logically, that evening we went to the pub for dinner, and struck up conversations with lots of locals, and we won some money on the VLTs, rubbing elbows with every patron in the place. Hopefully Dorth didn’t start some new epidemic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did.
The next day was grueling. We drove ten hours from Swift Current to Revelstoke. We got a motel room, and a room for my uncle who we were trying not to infect. We drove him to Calgary on our way to Saskatoon, then we picked him back up as we went by going west. The next morning we drove home. We tested again and this time we were both negative, so we invited our co-workers over for desert. We had a houseful of water meter people eating apple and blueberry fritters with strawberry pie. And as far as I know, no one got sick.