August 3 - Day Eternity

Aug 3 from Bonz

Up at 5:00 to play golf in mountains since we changed our route completely yesterday. Day after losing truck keys, I lost my sunglasses. Need to do something totally different. So here we are. I'm sure Peach will have a few words later.

Yep, this is PEACH again, which means another Bonz story. So, 2 days ago is when he temporarily lost his keys, I found them. That evening is when I stopped a couple who had just finished fishing and they gave us a ride to Pickleball. Then, after Pickleball a very nice young mom and her 2 young kids gave us a ride back to our camper because the weather looked menacing. I'm wedged between the kids' car seats-Dick is lounging in the front seat holding his court shoes and his prescription sunglasses in a case. Wellll, yesterday morning, we're all packed up, ready to roll and Dick says he can't find his sunglasses. The truck and camper are searched-nada. He "woes is me" again. I suggest we drive to the arena where Pickleball was-nada again. We both remember the street where the young mom lives. There's her car. I knock on the door (Dick is down the block hiding in the truck), she opens the door all excited "oh, you do want to shower and wash your clothes, I'm so happy to help you !" I tell her about Dick's glasses, she has me check her car. Yep, there they are on the floor! The young mom says things like that happen all the time because her husband has ADHD.  I tell her how sorry I am for her and we both laughed.

This is BONZ replying to my lovely bride's somewhat misleading blog entry (completely accidental, I am sure.) First, I wasn't "lounging" in the front seat of the woman's car. I was busily engaging in conversation with her, while also attempting to entertain the kids in the backseat with high five games and weird noises. I figured the woman was doing us a big favor, so I was attempting to reciprocate. Second, I wasn't "hiding" in the truck. We had the trailer attached,  and to drive down the dead-end street the woman lived on would have been risking having to turn around by backing the trailer up. My lack of backing up with any accuracy has been well documented during these posts, so you can understand why I wisely kept the rig on the main street instead of driving down the cul-de-sac.  Plus I stayed with the truck so the woman wouldn't be nervous if we both showed up at her door. I was also parked in a no parking zone, so I stayed near the rig to protect it. But Piech has a right to be bemused, since my two consecutive screw ups cost us some precious relaxation time. So as she was comfortably inside the camper, I stayed outside and talked to our camping neighbors. A guy from Quebec had just come from the way I had planned, straight across Canada, through Jasper, Edmonton, to Winnipeg and south into Minnesota. His English wasn't great, and he'd been drinking, but I understood him to say there's nothing special on that route unless you like cities and the same kind of landscape all across the plains.  So we changed the route once again. Instead of passing east through Jasper, we turned south onto the Icefields parkway to Banff. We'd driven this road in the opposite direction in the early days of our trip, so I wasn't originally interested in doing it again. Occasionally, a  woman looks beautiful from one particular direction, but then she turns around toward you and destroys the illusion. Sometimes a woman looks just as good, or even better, when you see the other side of her that you didn't see the first time you saw her.  The Icefields Parkway is such a woman: magnificent from either direction! Going back to Banff put us close to the Kananaskis Country Club golf course. We had visited it the first time  we went to Banff, but didn't play due to cost and time. We regretted that decision and didn't want our golfing friends (You know who you are)to shame us again, so we played the course today. The only tee time available was 7:03 a.m. The only nearby place to stay last night was a casino parking lot. We got almost no sleep and got up at 5:00 to play on a course we had no business playing, but at least we'd be an early twosome and could get in front of people who cared. We thought that until the starter at the first tee introduced us to the other twosome of our new foursome; a mature couple from Calgary. They had their names embroidered on their bags. The woman also had something about "Women's flight champion."  They both were clearly very good. Being out of practice from sitting six weeks in the car, preceded by two hand surgeries, I approached the first tee box with some apprehension. I barely contacted the  ball on my first drive with the toe of the driver, and the ball dribbled off the left side of the tee box, into the Kananaskis River. The man "blessed" with playing with us, said, "Try it again." The second shot did the same damn thing. I heard Peach say, "Oh my." I heard the other couple whisper, "Are you kidding me?" I ended up dripping a ball in the fairway near where Peach's drive ended up, which, frankly wasn't very far. Meanwhile as Peach and I both played the first hole in double digits, the two people with us both parred. I got much better as the round went on, as my drives actually got pretty good, and I parked a bunch of holes, but I never rivaled the Calgarians. Peach got the best value for her money, getting to swing a heck of a lot more than the rest of us.  Although we were hugely outclassed by the other two, we had a decent time in beautiful weather on a breathtaking golf course in the mountains. Would we do that again? Hell no. 

We're pretty tired after the short night in the casino parking lot. We're thinking of only going a few hours today; either toward Medicine Hat, Alberta, or across the border to Montana. Playing it by ear, but we for absolute sure won't be parking in a casino parking lot.

The two of us on the tenth tee at Kananaskis Country Club.

Peach about to hit a 300 yard drive (that's her story and she's sticking to it.)

Peach and I on the Icefields Parkway, second time around