Oh Canada! A rocky road...

Ever hit a big rock?
On the highway?
Driving at least 50 miles per hour?

I would not recommend it…

I had a fantastic time in Canada. The horses, the people and the quietness of the country side were good medicine for the soul. We didn’t have much time off but after two months me and the other student Kate were allowed to take the bosses car and drive down to Calgary to go see a big International Jumping event. There even were some Dutch professionals coming to compete... whoohoo....

Chris (our boss) had arranged that we could stay at a friend’s place. We just had to drive down there on Friday go to the show on Saturday and Sunday and then drive back home so we could be back at work at Touchstone Farm on Monday.

Things went well…. Well, until we got in Calgary.

We were driving along the highway after having met our lovely host for the weekend and told her that Kate and I were going to see where exactly the show was going to be held so we wouldn’t be late the next morning. We also figured while we were in Calgary we should make the best of it and maybe even go to dinner and see a movie.

Because it was later in the afternoon the roads weren’t that crowded and we were driving smoothly on a well kept highway, having a good conversation and listning to some good music trying to figure out where we needed to go the next morning.

And then we see this big brown thing in the middle of the highway… We discuss the issue at hand and come to the conclusion, that it must be a carton box, maybe fallen off of a truck or something. Then we discussed if it would be possible to drive over it and what would happen if we did… we were feeling pretty gutsy and daring, driving 60 miles an hour…

BIG BLOND MOMENTS GOING ON RIGHT THERE AND THEN!

When we are about 50 feet from the “carton box” Kate yells at me “THAT IS NOT A CARTON BOX!!!” At exactly the same moment that she yells, I noticed the same thing! It is not a carton box it is a SOLID ROCK!!!

The moment we realize it is not a carton box of about 2 by 2 feet big, defiantly not something to drive over at 60 miles an hour, I yank the steering wheel over to avoid the thing, yelling back to to Kate that she "needs to hold on!!!"

We missed the rock… well, actually we didn’t, but the car was still going…. “Who on earth leaves a SOLID ROCK in the middle of a highway anyway!!!???”

Kate was pretty pale and I’m sure I was even paler, together we let out a breath of relief and I slowed down. We did a quick check, check, doulbe check: the car was still driving, we didn’t hear any crazy sounds and we almost didn’t hit anything, and we were still alive. But we felt incredibly stupid...

While recuperating we noticed a four dollar movie theater. Because we were pretty shaken up we figured, go eat something, go to the movies and go back to bed. We had enough excitement for one day...

I park the car and as I exit the car I hear this hissing noise… Kate heard the same hissing sound and we checked where it came from. And yes being girls with no “car mechanics background” it should have been real hard for us to figure out what was wrong. But it wasn’t…

It was pretty easy actually and that didn’t help the situation. There was a hole in the tire. And not only was there a hole in the tire, there was something wrong with the rim. A rim is supposed to be nice and round, and this one wasn’t. It was bent. And bent isn’t even the right word it was more like it had  a 2 inch gap in the middle…

We looked around and noticed that on the other side of the road there was a garage (I know, we had a least 4 little angels sitting on our shoulders). We hopped in the car drove (really, really slowly) to the other side of the road and hurried inside, trying to find somebody who could help us.

It was five minutes to five on a Friday afternoon….

We did find a nice gentleman who tried to help us but because it was so late during the day and he did have a tire but NO rim, he could’t really do more. He gave us addresses of local scrap yards and told us we needed to find a new rim, and then he would put it on for us the next morning.

Feeling even dumber we went back to our lovely host. We told her that we had a “little bit” of an accident and that we needed to go find a new rim for Chris’s car the next day. That Saturday we spent THE WHOLE DAY looking for a rim and by 2 o clock in the afternoon we had found one. Brought it to the nice car mechanic and he said he needed the rest of the day to fix our car back up. At 6 o clock and a lot of Canadian dollars lighter we had our car back. And no, we didn’t see one horse at all that day…

That Sunday we didn’t really feel like going to the show, after all, all the good riders had already competed on Saturday so we decided to drive the four hours back to Touchstone Farm. We thanked our host and she promised us not to tell Chris.

We got home early that Sunday and told Chris we enjoyed the show. He never found out (or so we thought). At least not until I went back to Touchstone 5 years later and told him about that time that we got him a "free" new rim…

So for all of you miss smarty pants that have the feeling that they need to be brave and gutsy every now and then, NEVER get gutsy with a ROCK on a HIGHWAY… it’s just not worth it… trust me... i know...


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