The May Long Weekend

Life has been so busy the last little while that I was just not able to get our trailer out of storage and make plans to get away for the May Long Weekend.  Typically this is our first camping weekend of the year.  The weather forecast to the west, in the mountains, and to the south, in the badlands, was not good.  There were rainfall warnings in the mountains with up to 4" in the forecast.  The badlands were supposed to get periods of rain over the weekend.  I probably could have stayed up late for a couple of nights and got the trailer ready if I really wanted to...  But, with our recent travels to Utah and to Fairmont I also had a lot of things to catch up on around the house.  I didn't see much point in sittng in the trailer in the rain when I had so much to do at home.  The forecast for around Edmonton was not bad, with mixed skies and only a slight chance of showers.  So I elected not to get the trailer out this weekend and instead caught up on a whole bunch of odd jobs...

I took my lawnmower in to get serviced, I helped my Mom set up the lawnmower on her garden tractor, I picked up some groceries, I BBQ'd our evening meal on Saturday, I made some unsharp masks in my darkroom for printing, I got some salmon fillets into a brine for smoking and later in the weekend smoked the fish in my smoker, I went into my darkroom and made some prints for an upcoming show, I fixed the gates in our yard, I installed some computer software for my Mom, I organized my hockey roster for our next game, I prepared a zoning application for the property down in East Coulee, I mixed up some sepia toner and toned the prints that I made, I got those finished prints into the washer, and... on Sunday I took the girls out for the day....

We went out for breakfast in the morning to Dennys.  As I looked around the restaurant I noticed that at least one-quarter of the patrons were clincially obese.  One guy in particular filled up the entire bench of a booth, and had to rest his "man-boobs" on the edge of the table.  A sad state of affairs to say the least.  I guess the fact that none of my girls finished their breakfast was perhaps a good thing...

After breakfast we set off to the northeast.  

We passed through Elk Island National Park but by this point it was too late in the day for much wildlife to be out and we didn't see much.  We continued on and our next stop was the town of Hairy Hill.  I wanted to photograph a couple of the old buildings but on this day main street was full of parked cars and it seemed there was some event taking place at the community hall.  I'm not sure exactly what it was but based on the dress of some of the people, it must have been for a hutterite or mennonite group of some sort.  We did see a flock of Snow Geese on a small pond outside of town.

We continued to the north and decided to check out the old abandoned Russian Monastery up in Smoky Lake County.  At first I took the wrong road and we ended up too far to the east.  We spotted a really cool old house, a large and very distinguished looking place, down near a small lake.  But, there were no roads to get up to the place and all we found was a pile of dead coyotes that someone must have shot and dumped beside the road.  We made our way back to the west and eventually found the monastery.  This place had been left behind back in the 1960's and what remained of the buildings was pretty much in ruins.  It had been a couple of years since I was last out this way.  Someone had erected a small sign stating that the site had been re-established in 2009.  I had been here in the winter of 2012 and the sign was not there at that time.  Nothing had really changed much except for one thing...  Someone had moved an old piano into a clearing between all the buildings and there it stood, in the middle of the forest, slowly falling apart.  It was an unusual sight to say the least.

We spent some time here and I made a few photographs.  Then we continued back towards the city. We stopped again at Hairy Hill to see if the crowd had thinned out a little.  Some of the vehicles had left by this time in the afternoon so we wandered around and explored a bit.  After that we headed back towards home.  Not much excitement after that, though we did see a red fox on the side of the highway.

At the end of the long weekend, as things were finally winding down, we got a jolt of excitement, and not the good kind.  Helena slipped in the living room and banged her face on the corner of the coffee table.  She ended up with a small but very deep gash on her cheek that was bleeding heavily.  Margarit rushed her over to the local medi-clinic.  She was rushed to the front of the line of at least 20 other patients and given special attention.  They gave her a couple of needles to freeze her face and put in two small stitches.  Margarit was amazed at her physical strength and the fact that it was all she and the nurse could do to hold her down while she was being given the needles and the stitches.  Now two days later she has a big black eye, a puffy face, and a bandage beside her eye... but she won't let me take her photograph...