A Saturday Away

Gee whiz... what a weekend. Well, Saturday anyways... it was quite the day. But I should open up what I wrote on Friday morning to see where I left off. I didn't exactly have much of a chance yesterday to do any writing and right at the moment I am getting the photos and video from the Banff excursion from Jeff via MSN Messenger.

Okay, I think I'm ready to go now...

Friday at work was again pretty slack. There really wasn't a whole lot... and what needed to be done was done in pretty good time. There were a couple companies catching up with their filing for the past month and a bit, so it did manage to keep Troy and myself busy. I didn't have my MP3 player with me for most of the day, but that wasn't too bad. Troy was sort of behaving himself, just playing his music (which wasn't too bad, very bluesy) and not doing very much of his bad humming or singing. All in all, it was a pretty good day at the office.

The plan for Friday night was to keep it pretty quiet and simple over at Jeff's place and that's pretty much what we had done... after a short visit to the Wildfire, as I had to drop off my printed copies of the Street Hockey Tournament poster. There we stayed for a few, Benny had to go home and shower and whatever before we headed over... but eventually we got there. Just the three of us sat around, watched some TV, played some poker and eventually threw in Zoolander into the DVD player and watched that until we were all ready to pass out around 2am. We didn't really drink too much... well, Jeff and I didn't... Benny had a few more through the day than we did... but all in all, we didn't have too much. That was probably a good thing since we wanted to get up in the morning to head out to Banff.

Saturday...

Sorta groggily woke up around 9am and immediately got onto the phone to see how far along the boys were before taking off. Got both Benny and Jeff on the horn... went for my shower... packed up the car and was at Jeff's place for 9:50am.

The weather in Langdon was pretty much perfect... just below zero, clear skies, very little wind... it was supposed to be a great day out in Banff for Saturday as well (highs of +5 in the mountains).

Jeff piled his shit into the car and then off around a few corners to pick up Benson and then we were off... not before hitting the busiest Tim Hortons in town on 52nd Street SE. But finally, once we were outta there the trip really began.

The drive out was pretty fantastic. The car, all filled up, new headlights and all of it's lubricants and fluids topped up, went like a charm. Once we were out of the city limits, there was very little stopping me from doing 130km/h for most of the drive out to Banff. I did slow down a bit through Canmore, one of the more populated areas of the drive, just in case of cops, but for the most part, we flew all the way there. It was quite good to take the car for that long of a drive, that was really it's first real good run with me. I mean, I do take it on pretty good runs when I come home from floor hockey or work... but this was a good sized distance as well.

We finally arrived into the super-clean air of Banff just around noon and after a short walk around... our first big stop was the local Irish pub for lunch and a pint.

After a good lunch, one bad pint, but one good one too, we took off for our trip around town. Man, it was really good to just hang out somewhere relatively new. Jeff had his cell phone that took most of the pictures that I'll post here... like this one of Benny and I outside of the pub that we had lunch in.

We pretty much just cruised around for the first couple hours before we decided to go for our hike. We decided to climb the paths of the Gondola run up Sulfur Mountain. I parked the car in the Hot Springs/Gondola run parking lot and we put our boots on and headed up the trail.

It was quite the hike to head up the hill. The whole trail is over 6km long, if I remember correctly... just weaving left and right up the hill. The trail was quite snowy with a layer of ice underneath the powder, so it made some parts of the walk a little tougher than others. The snow was quite light, but still sticky, which made for some great snowball fights as we headed up the hill. We climbed up for about an hour, which brought us to the first Gondola clearings... about a mile and a half up the trail. Not quite as high in the elevation... but quite a bit of the trail was covered.

On the way down, the only thing that was covered was us... with snow. We'd run and slide down the trail, with a few wipeouts and planned videos with wipeouts. I starred in a couple of them. What a great laugh that was. Benny and I star in a film clip of us sliding headfirst, kinda like a baseball slide, down the trail for a bit. That was quite funny.

After we got down to the car, only then did we realize how soaken wet we were from playing in the snow. My boots and socks were pretty soaked, but I came out pretty easy by comparison. Both Benny and Jeff were soaked almost up to their knees. I had some water-resistant khaki pants on, so the water really just rolled off and my cuffs remained pretty dry, which was pretty sweet.

Next on the agenda, dinner. We piled into the car... did some donuts in the parking lot... and headed back into the town centre. We hit Wild Bills for a bite to eat, managed to catch the end of the Redskins/Seahawks game and most of the first half of the Patriots/Broncos game, while we tried to decide what we'd do for the rest of the evening. Since it was still fairly early when we finished eating, we decided to walk around to a few of the pubs and such to see what we could find.

We rolled into Tommy's Neighbourhood Pub for a round on the Golden Tee machine and a few drinks. That night, the general idea was not to drink anything we'd normally drink at the Wildfire... which made for different beers everywhere. I also got into the Brandy & Red Bull as well.

Man, we were sure on a mission to try and pick up some girls as well. Since Jeff led me to AskMen.com and all of their articles of "male issues," it had given us some confidence to go and do our thing out in Banff. We always had our eyes peeled while we were wandering around town. During the day, it was pretty dead in the groups of female sorts... but it did sort of pick up once the evening hit.

We walked around to this pub, Melissa's, which was absolutely packed. And for good reason too... the drink prices were definitely reasonable. In there, there were people from all over. All of the skiers and vacationers who were generally below the age of 30 were kicking about in there and it was just elbow to elbow full of people. There, Jeff started to chat with a girl at the bar sitting in a group of girls. Before too long, the drinks were coming by the two-fist varieties... and the chatting commenced. I got my opportunity to jump in there and meet Jen and her two friends, Jessica and Alex. All three girls were out to get smashed and were doing a good job. Unfortunately, ol' Benny was not having the greatest of times... in his drunkeness, he became quite beligerant and it was a job not only to chat with these lovely ladies, but to keep him at bay. He wasn't very happy at Jeff for a reason I couldn't quite figure out... he was mad at Jeff for being rather selfish, but the three of us were supposed to be ALL chatting these three girls up... the math worked, so I really couldn't gauge where Benny was coming from.

So despite Benny's best attempts at throwing a fit, we actually managed to drink with these girls and get them out to one of the local clubs, Aurora. But unfortunately, on the walk over... Alex, the 18 year old, had left her boyfriend back home from her business trip and he had been dogging her cell phone leaving messages and such... so from there, the party was starting to fade with these girls as they were trying to attend to Alex's problem... and sort of neglecting us to some degree. So, saying that... we just sort of let them to it and in the end they disappeared.

Aurora was a pretty reasonable club... the music wasn't fantastic, but it was pretty good. The crowd was pretty heavy and it made for some pretty good tours. By the time we got in there, I had pretty much quit drinking and was primarily on Red Bulls... but by 2:00am and the last calls, I had faded pretty badly and had sobered up quite a bit and found myself just exhausted. Jeff was still a raging hard-on trying to find anything that would pretty much go with him... and good on him for trying to drag beligerant Benny and my exhausted ass with him. When we went to go grab our coats from the coat check, he had met an absolute hottie from Brazil there... but to be honest, I was just too knackered to give a shit. We walked down the block and instead of grabbing my bag out of the car like I said I was gonna do, I just hopped into the car, started it up for some heat and just lied down for a bit.

By then, I was pretty content on not dropping a load more money on a hotel room and just sleep in the car. Ha ha... but to do that, I would have to move it from the parking lot it was in to somewhere that had overnight parking. So, I pulled out and drove around the block, where Benny caught me driving and rang me on thephone. I said I was trying to find a new spot and then I'd join them. Well, the trip around the block was rather fruitless and I just went back to the lot where I was and just sat there. I wasn't in any shape or form to join them whereever they were... so I just rang Benny up again and told him I was back in the previous and he left Jeff to the Brazillian hottie.

When Benny came and joined me it was just about 3am and he was pretty content to sit in the back of the car and fall asleep. Eventually, Jeff joined us in his horned up state, trying to convince the two of us to cruise the streets to look for more girls as there wasn't enough to go around with the Brazillian. Neither Benny or myself was having it... so there we stayed. Benny snored and Jeff muttered... I couldn't actually fall asleep. The Red Bull outweighed the exhaustion level and it kept me awake. By about ten to 4am... I had enough of just lying there and put the key in the ignition and said, 'fuck it, we're leaving.'

The streets and highways were dead. But the darkness was very, very dark... and I wasn't in any hurry to drive like a madman, which was beneficial because once we had passed through Canmore, Jeff checking up with me to see if I was alright every 10 minutes or so, we hit a wall of snowy weather, where it just almost was blizzard conditions. A complete white-out. The lines on the road were disappearing and well... it was all guess work after that. So, instead I pulled over onto the side of the road until someone passed by and then I followed this taxi van for a while through the snow. His high beams were far brighter than mine... and although we stopped once due to the weather, we continued on until we hit the city. Once we got to Calgary Olympic Park, the roads were much clearer and we were within the city light.

It took a good two hours to get home... and I stumbled through the door just before 6am. What a night!

That was my Saturday... which led into a really lazy Sunday.

It was a pretty good weeekend. Good thing I get the day off tomorrow... more to come about that tomorrow.