How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part 1

Prologue
My cousin Angela got married on July 20th in Steinbach, Manitoba (about 45 minutes outside of Winnipeg). When my mom and dad and I started making plans to attend, initially we were only going to take a couple of days, go to the wedding and come home again. Somewhere along the way, we decided to extend our trip and take a little vacation. With my Dad needing to have two separate surgeries (one for his cancer and one on his that keeps dislocating), it's uncertain when we'll have another chance to take a vacation. We decided that we would leave on Thursday the 17th once I got home from work, drop the dogs off at their kennel (it was on our way) and drive to Saskatoon where we'd spend the night. Friday morning we'd get up, have breakfast at one of our favourite restaurants, and then drivwe to Winnipeg. I was staying with my Aunty Ingrid and Uncle Rick; Mom and Dad were going to be staying with my Uncle Wayne (Uncle Rick and Uncle Wayne are my mom's brothers). We'd have Saturday to rest from our travels, and we had been invited to my cousin Kristi's home for dinner. The wedding was going to be on Sunday, and we were going to leave the reception a little bit early to cross the border into North Dakota. Our destination was Grand Forks. We were going to spend two nights there (so Dad could go to Menards hardware store) and then continue driving across North Dakota and Montana to Missoula over the course of the week. We planned to spend a night in Great Falls so that Mom and I could go to the Goodwill store there (people always think we're nuts when we tell them that that's our favourite store there) before going to Missoula. We'd spend three nights in Missoula to do some shopping and then come home.

Ever heard the saying "Man plans, God laughs"? Yeah. Here's how our vacation really went...

Remind me again why I left work early?
I had made arrangements to get out of work an hour early, thinking (perhaps rather foolishly) that we could get on the road earlier, and thus get to Saskatoon earlier. Boy, was I wrong! I made one quick stop on the way home - to buy panythose for the wedding that I didn't end up wearing anyway - and then headed home. Mom had gone into the city to get a few things, and apparently got home not very long before I did. I was pretty much packed; my mom, not so much. So when I got home, she was running around in a tizzy madly trying to finish her packing. Too much of a tizzy, apparently; she forgot to pack a couple of rather essential items (I won't go into the specifics; suffice it to say we had to make an emergency stop at Wal-Mart in Saskatoon before we left the next morning). We finally got out of the house at 6:30, and I think the only reason we left then was because we had to drop the dogs off before 7:00. As it was, we just barely made it to the kennel.

To be continued...