Travel Tuesday-Ontario Edition

If I was organized about things, I would surely have these ready a couple of days in advance instead of just writing them on Tuesday. I mean, that way, I could actually edit them and what not. That will be my goal for next week.

In unrelated, yet related news, I have made it one of my goals of January 2010 to declutter my life. I have so much stuff, and I need...not to. So, I've decided I am going to gather all the stuff I no longer have any use for, sell it on Ebay or Kijiji, and then hopefully make enough money to pay for Matador U Travel Writing Program. This seems like the perfect solution because I have no extra money at this point to pay for it, and all this stuff is just sitting around anyway. We'll see how it goes. So far, I've made $10. So just $340 more. I'm giving myself until the end of Feb.

Anyway! Today's Travel story takes place in my university town, London, Ontario.

The Boler Bump

We both got on the elevator with all our ski gear. We had decided to take the bus to the ski hill because it seemed like a direct route, and neither one of us had a car. It didn’t occur to us at the time that this would perhaps be a hassle both for us and the other people on the bus. People cursed at us as we got on and jostled for space with our bags and skis; and then they all stared at us like we were completely crazy.

After about a 15 minute ride downtown, it turned out we had to transfer buses. We hopped off and trudged over to where the connecting bus was supposed to come. We waited, and waited, and waited. Our eyelashes began to freeze as our eyes watered from the wind, and we became increasingly irritated.

“Do you think the bus is ever going to come?” We whined and freezed and whined and freezed. Just as we were contemplating giving up and taking the bus back home, a lady in a sedan pulled up.

“You girls going skiing?” We stared at her and then stared at our skis. Clearly we were.

“Boler Mountain’s quite a bus ride from here…I’ll give you a ride!”

We hesitated for perhaps 10 seconds before we agreed that this would be a great idea. We followed the lady to her car, and helped her as she packed our skis and bags into the truck. We looked at each other once before getting in the car, as if to say, “well, she very well could be taking us out to the woods to hack us to bits, but at this point, it beats standing in the cold”. She drove us all the way out to Boler Mountain, which indeed would have been an eternally long bus ride. She dropped us off and we thanked her profusely, and then went to get our lift tickets. It was at this point we realized we had just travelled a total of what added up to several hours to come skiing at a place where there was one chair lift and something that barely passed as a mountain. We stared at the hill in disappointment for a while, but we went to ski and that was exactly what we were going to do.

We rode the chair lift up and skied down the hill in about 20 seconds. We repeated this about 10 times before deciding to head in for dinner. As we sat in the cafeteria style room with our french fries and hamburgers, a girl with long blond hair came up to us.

“Are you Megan and Kaitlyn?” she inquired.

“Yes…” Kaitlyn replied, “Ummmm, how do you know?”

“My mom told me!” she chirped, “she said she had given two girls a ride to the ski hill and I just figured it was you! I work here!”

Apparently for some reason we didn’t know, we stood out.

“Oh, well it was so nice of your mom to drive us!! We probably still would have been waiting at the bus stop if she hadn’t!” I smiled at her.

She smiled back, said “nice to meet you”, and was on her way.

“Wow”, Kaitlyn said, “that was random”.

We finished our dinner and went out for a couple more rides up and down the ski lift, before deciding to call it a night. There was only one bus back to town and we sure didn’t want to miss it. We packed up all our gear and headed over to the bus stop. It was frigid out. An hour later, the bus came. We made it downtown to catch our connecting bus, and were standing awkwardly with our skis, leaning against the bus shelter. A man wandered up to us, looking slightly…tattered.

“You guys just go skiing?” he said, slurring slightly. “Where abouts did you go?”

We told him about Boler Bump, and it was at this point that things went slightly downhill. All of a sudden, he was shouting at the top of his lungs,

“I USED TO DO THAT SHIT!! I had money once! Do you think I’ve always been like this, do you??? I used to do that shit! I did!!”

Kait and I stared wearily/fearfully at each other as he continued on his tirade. People passed by in the street and shot us looks that said, “we feel for you, but at no point will we be intervening in this situation.”

As the man continued to yell and get increasingly in our face, we both were just kind of frozen onto the sidewalk. We had our skis leaning on the bus shelter, so it wasn’t easy to just walk away. We shrugged at him. Eventually his yelling turned to disgusted muttering and he walked away from us.

“Wow”, Kaitlyn said, “Just wow…this day is ridiculous!”

We had just started to laugh it off, when we noticed the man was rounding the corner and now coming back towards us. We looked at each other, grabbed our skis and took off across the street for the safer pastures of McDonalds.

“Hey!!!” he shouted after us, “heyyyyyy!!!”.

Clearly we ignored him and huddled down inside the entrance to the fast food restaurant.

“Should we maybe call the cops?” Kaitlyn said, picking up the receiver of a pay phone.

“I dunno”, I said, as I peered out the window at him. “Maybe we should just get on a bus and get the hell out of here.”

We stayed in the alcove until a bus came, and then ran across the street to hop on. Never in my life have I been more thankful to get on public transportation. We sunk down into the plastic seats, and took up two more with all our ski gear. We finally made it back to our residence safe and sound.

That was the first and last time we skied the Boler Bump, but to this day, it remains the most random day of my life.

Fini.

Okay, so it doesn't take place in the most exotic of locations, but thinking of that day now makes me crack up. It was just a series of one random event after another. One of those things that is hilarious now, but was really not so funny as it was happening. Ohhh boy.