Just when you think one thing,...something else comes along and changes everything.
On Thursday I get on a plane bound for Ottawa, Ontario. My wife has committed me to attending a wedding that I learn is in a small farming community 40 or so miles to the west.
These people are related to Kate on her mother's side, but we barely know them. ( as much as any of us know our distant family). They are steryotypical rural Canadians...sturdy, hard working, focused on family and community. (as all farmers are, I'm sure). But the one thing her cousins aren't are........talkers.
A conversation with these guys are a chore...i know from personal experience. Every time I've been in the same place with them over these last 20 years tge conversation was limited to "How's it goin?"
Now I'm gonna be stuck in a small town full of these kinda guys with a whole bunch of dead time in between.....
Woo-hoo!
When I get to the Quality Inn in Arnprior Ontario, I get the full update... The weddings gonna be in a church, the receptions gonna be in a BF tent.
I meet the wedding couple, ( I know one of them). I meet the family of the one I don't know, I meet the family of the one I do.
( I find out that it's only Kate's family that lack conversational skills, the other guys will talk your ear off)
As a footnote, there's bad weather forecasted for later that day,....right about the time of the reception...at the same time that were all gonna be.....in the B.F. tent.
The wedding goes as planned, we all adjourned to the farm where the bf tent is,
And I'm silently musing to myself....wondering if this tent will survive high winds if/when the weather turns bad.
I walk around the property, trying to kill time, which BTW is located right next to the old abandoned hwy17 truck stop.
( that has now become the hwy17 truck repair stop)
Evidently, they don't repair Chevrolet pickup trucks..at the hwy17 truck repair stop,...they just throw them btches away.
I look up the road at the sky,......there is definitely bad sht coming.
The wind has been blowing pretty briskly for hours....., it's whipping the tent, it's threatening to blow dresses up and hats off,...and tents......away.
I'm in the bathroom when a weather alert goes off on my phone...the CanadianWeatherService has just put the area in a tornado warning..
A tornado warning.
A super rare event in this part of the country...arnprior is about 400 miles north of Watertown NY....I'm quite confident that a tornado there is just as rare too.
But here we are...all dressed up, with nothing to take shelter in except.....a big...fcking..tent.
This just keeps getting better by the minute.
The powers that be decide to split us up into two groups, and shuttle us off to two different farmhouses that have basements. There is one on the same property as the tent, and another 1mile to the west.....directly in the path of the oncoming storm. We go into the mouth of the beast.
I'm sitting in the passenger seat next to the wife, who's driving because she rented a 7 passenger sized SUV. We're all packed in, 8 people jammed in a space for 7. We get to the farmhouse right as the rain starts, and right over the car I look up and say out loud, look at the funnel!....
The freaking tornado formed right over our heads.
It touched down about 300 yds to the East of us, and started on what would later become its 50 mile path..evidently dancing and jumping on both sides of the road between here and the BFT....
But took a turn before it got there,...and left that vulnerable structure alone.
It did however break, and uproot trees, between here and there..
how it dodged the tent is a miracle, and at the time, we all had no idea of what plans that storm had in store for its future path...for all of the build up to the actual storm, the aftermath was dead calm.
But for the Robertson's....the wedding reception was on....and it went off without a hitch afterwards.
That tornado became an F3 as it moved on at 80 mph eventually slamming into communities in and around Ottawa...
( Where I am presently). When we got here yesterday afternoon, there was city wide power outages, non operational traffic lights, and obvious wind damage...Fortunately some areas had power restored and our hotel happened to be one...
Today will be my last day here...i planned to be home, but we decided to stay given that Ottawa is so cool...
That leaves me only a precious couple of days to get the monster ready for his big drive to the Coast...But that is still left to decide anyway.