Getting Out of the City
July 3, 2015 10:40 am Leave your thoughts
Wow, things have been getting way busier than before, I nearly forgot about blogging all together!
With the funding approved for both my engine replacement and steam reduction project, things have really started to take off. Ordering parts, setting up contractors, creating work and safety plans, and just trying to keep it all organized has certainly been keeping me super busy. I’ve nearly forgotten the colour of my desk, which is buried somewhere under all these papers. But it’s not just work that’s been keeping me active, the past few weekends have been quite eventful as well.
This past weekend I was able to get away for a bit to a farm just outside the northern, Albertan hamlet of Joussard. Bordering Lesser Slave Lake, is this tiny town that somehow made Grande Prairie feel big. Camp fires, live music and a ton of people all attending a family reunion made for an excellent getaway and a healthy dose of the Albertan life. The days were beautiful, with Sunday getting as hot as 35°C without a cloud in the sky. However, that did make for some pretty uncomfortable morning wake ups in a tent, which was more of a makeshift oven in that situation. I suppose an optimistic view would be that there were so many flies out there that their swarms formed these black, morphing clouds that may have actually provided us with a little shade. We were also able to get out onto the water early morning and caught something like 27 fish, which made the 6 a.m. wake up pretty worth it.
The weekend previous to last was also, strangely enough, spent just outside Joussard at the annual North Country Fair. Which is a decent sized music festival surrounded by the most packed camp ground I have even seen. There was a sea of tents, campers, canopies and even the odd teepee or two. But since I am just here for the summer, a tent wasn’t something I was expecting to need. Thus my little home for the weekend was a mattress stuffed into the back of an SUV, which actually wasn’t so bad considering how much it rained. Keeping with the theme of being unprepared, I showed up sporting some Vans shoes and a hoody, only to be greeted with a ton of rain and muddy pathways. My shoes were promptly flooded and a garbage bag rain suit saved the rest of my clothes. Apparently shoes take a lot longer to dry than they do to get wet, leaving me shoeless for the remaining day and a half. Luckily the festival is commonly referred to as “Hippy Days”, so going barefoot actually made me blend in more than stand out. Shoes or no shoes, the festival was a blast and I hope I can make it back there one day.
That’s it for my weekend adventures but I plan on having some more and look forward to blogging all about it.
Until next time,
Tanner Linssen