A Spontaneous Road Trip

You may want to find a favorite easy chair and kick back with your feet back, because I've really been catching up on my blog updates tonight... Scroll down all the way, as there's tons of pictures to see and other updates on our exploits at Halloween, football, etc. in addition to this post. You may need to click on a link at the bottom to see what might not be on this web page, as I'm not sure how many posts/pictures can fit on one page... I apologize for the screwy chronology of things on here, as I didn't post pictures at all in the order they were taken other than Halloween and of course this post will reference events that took place below this post, so it reads somewhat like a reverse chronology of sorts.

On with the story... So we got home late Friday night/early Saturday morning, something like 1:30 or so from the football game. We stopped in every town on the way back from Grand Forks to take pictures in front of any "significant" landmark the boys could lay eyes on. We fell asleep pretty late that morning and woke up about 11:00 or so on Saturday morning. On our drive back to TRF, though, we were all talking about our old neighbors, Dave and Cheri Widerski, and their kids that used to play with the boys and their friend, Dorion. I halfheartedly suggested we could maybe visit them down where they now live in Alexandria, Minnesota, some 180 miles or so south of us. I didn't know exactly how far away it was, though, and Dorion seemed to think it was "right next to" the Twin Cities, which more or less ruled that out as an option in the near future for me.

After waking up as noted above, though, I pulled up the map program for Alexandria and determined it was indeed "only" the 180 miles or so and so not having anything else real productive to do, I asked all three boys if they felt like paying their old friends a visit in Alexandria, which of course they all unanimously approved rather excitedly and a phone call to the Widerskis and about an hour and a half later, we found ourselves making a quick lunch of it at McDonald's before we were on our way south on Highway 59 out of town towards Alexandria.

As we drove south, Dorion video taped a good part of the "Road Trip 2007" and of course we had to stop at just about every landmark in sight on the way down. The boys saw live buffalo alongside the highway, some alpacas, and we drove through the White Earth Indian Reservation at one point, I think. It was a great lesson in geography and the boys were bouncing off the walls the whole way down with their new spur of the moment "adventure" otherwise known as the traditional "road trip." The drive should have taken us only 3.5 hours or so, but we didn't pull into Alexandria until just shy of about 6:00 Saturday night, at least two hours later than it should have taken thanks to all the stops for photo opportunities.

Once we reached the Widerskis, it was as though time had stood still. Only the youngest Widerski, Johnny, really seemed to have changed physically with a growth spurt. All the other boys, Drew, Tyler, and Zach, appeared much the same as when they left well over a year ago. They ordered Godfather's pizza for us all and I visited with Pastor Dave and his wife for a good three hours while the boys headed off with their friends to catch up on lost time away from each other. Of course it would have been nice to "plan" the trip more in advance to spend more time down there, but given my schedule and their schedule down there and such, it was good we at least had that little time we did. Plus, the spontaneity of it all added a particularly exciting element to the adventure, especially surprising the Widerski boys with our visit.

The other "exciting" part of the trip was we happened to head out of town on the first day of the deer hunting season... So of course you have every deer hunter and their cousin in Minnesota loaded up on Budweiser with rifles they probably haven't shot more than once in the previous year heading out to their deer "stands" and "blinds" to take pot shots at the deer population. Add to that the interesting drive back in the dark and the knuckles can be a little white on the steering wheel if you get my drift. We didn't hear or otherwise witness any stray bullets, though, and didn't strike any deer ourselves, though just as I crossed the Pennington County line on the way back to Thief River last night, I quickly came upon a deer that a large truck had obviously encountered earlier (or what was left of the animal) in the middle of my lane. Thanks to the brights, I again had enough time to react, so I pulled around it and called the sheriff's office to suggest they remove it somehow from the road given the danger it would still pose in the dark to oncoming motorists, particularly those in smaller import cars, i.e. Hondas, etc. Another good use for a cell phone...

We got home last night about 2:30 a.m., but thanks to daylight saving time ending, we got an extra hour of sleep to recover before heading off to Sunday School at Trinity this morning where the boys earned their second consecutive "perfect attendance" award (helps when Dad teaches, huh?).

So now that our exciting Thursday through Sunday is over, we have the opening of basketball season to look forward to tomorrow after school lets out with a clinic for neophyte coaches like myself to figure out what we're doing before the season really gets underway. The varsity high school coach will be running the clinic to let us know the fundamental skills he'd like us to work with the younger kids on so they will hopefully have that foundation when they reach high school should they choose to continue playing. So we'll now have that on our plates for an activity a couple days a week with Aaron's games taking place at Franklin on Saturdays. I'm looking forward to getting some more exercise in these upcoming winter months. It just today started snowing in Thief River, so it won't be long before we go into hibernation around here...

So there you all have it.... Again, read on for the rest of our activities these past couple weeks and take a look at some of the pictures. Hopefully I haven't written too much at one time here...