I'm Baaack

It's pretty unbelievable how fast a long weekend can go with you have a very goofy, very foxy guy, a faux canopy bed with a mirror built into the ceiling and a jacuzzi tub within rolling distance from the aforementioned bed to fill it.

I had fun. A lot of fun. If anyone would have told me a month ago that I was going to High Level, Alberta (aka Little Vegas for it's 'strip' of such Nevada-esque inns as The Stardust and The Flamingo) and that I was not going to want to leave after a weekend, well, I would have smacked them upside the head and took away their crack.

But I did.

Blame it on the Dynamite Mr. Roberts for making it so. Indulging my cheesecake and Red Bull habits and altogether making me feel like a total and utter princess are definitely two things he excels at.

The bus ride down was fairly uneventful aside. Uneventful aside from the gaggle of Japanese girls on their way to Hay River who varied between talking animatedly at quarter past midnight with their lights on, or who kept putting down their seats to interfere with my personal space.

I slept for a few hours until we reached Slave Lake and we stopped for a snack break. It was about 3am, and I wandered outside to partake in a smoke. No sooner had I had a quick puff than 3 drunken natives wandered up to me attempting to bully me into giving them a smoke.

It didn't go well.

For them.

They wandered away, smokeless, slurring and muttering obscenities and I went back inside, tucked myself into the fetal position that I was starting to get used to and woke up in Peace River.

Way Way Way back in the day when Mr. Roberts and I first started seeing each other, he was working for a helicopter company in Grimshaw, just outside Peace River.

Our first date ever, I was in PR for a dog show and he picked me up from my hotel room and took me out for dinner. We drove around the town, he showed me a few things, then I made him pull over so I could kiss him. The rest of the night we sat on a hill overlooking the town and the river, made out and shared the small bits of other languages that we knew.

Most of them dirty.

It was a good night.

If I remember correctly, that was the last year that the Peace Country Kennel Club held a show. So this was the only time I've been back since was when Dawn, Tracy and I got lost on our late night road trip back to Dawson, where Dawn (and I refuse to take the blame for this since I was technically asleep), didn't turn back onto the highway at Valleyview and got us hopelessly lost.

And Peace River was pretty much completely the way I remembered it. Small enough to be a town, but with large rolling hills and a river running right through it. Pretty little place, Peace River is.

But getting to High Level and seeing those pretty blue eyes again after a few weeks -- that makes an 11 hour trip on the Big Grey dog so worth it. Despite the Japanese, and the Natives and even the weird guy at the Edmonton depot who kept digging to see if I was attached ("So.. who's Wayne? Is that your dad, or, umm, boyfriend?") were small fries because, I, I got to see my baby.