Think of a submarine sounding a ping and getting an echo… from Thunder Bay. It’s me, I’m back and I’m beautiful (five points to the commenter who knows what I’m parodying.) Anyways, it’s been over a week since I’ve been away from blogging, but I’ve got my eMac plugged into my father-in-law’s not-quite-high-speed-but-speedy-enough-for-now internet. So, I should be back to something close to normal blogging now.

First off, not that I think any of the thee will be reading this, but a big thanks to Roy, Peter and Roy for helping Jenn and I pack things up last Monday afternoon. Getting a UHaul was a frustrating task (especially since we had a reservation,) so it was especially nice to come home to these three guys who did almost all the work. Who knew that preachers were such good movers?

Jenn and I spent our last two nights in Ottawa at her sister’s place. Shannon and Don took really good care of us and it was nice to spend some quality time with them before we left. Wednesday morning we hit the highway at 7:30am. In Petawawa I parked on the side of the road with all the other big trucks while we went to the Tim Hortons. We also filled up the 26-footer there with $180 worth of gasoline. Crazy!

We traveled along through Sudbury onto the Sault with little to comment on. We devised some hand signals to keep each other apprised of our condition—did I forget to mention that I drove the big truck (at around 60mph) while Jenn followed in the Bora? The hand signals consisted of &ldquo:thumbs up” for everything is okay and “thumbs down” for I want to stop. The rule was, if someone made a hand signal, you had to respond with your condition. There were only two thumbs down on the whole trip—a bathroom break was needed once and Jenn was confused in the Sault and thought we missed our gas station.

We spent the night at Adam’s Hotel, the same place I stayed when I moved down to Ottawa almost three years ago. We had dinner at a restaurant on the Great Northern Road and stopped at Northern Breweries to pick up some nostalgia for dad.

After putting another $170 in the tank, we hit the road early on Thursday morning and I listened to CBC radio’s coverage of the London bombings. We stopped in Wawa for a quick stretch a couple hours later and then pushed through to White River. I was feeling a little more confident in the truck the second day and the road was smoother, so I had it running close to 65mph. We stopped to fill up again in Terrace Bay ($70 and some A&W) and made for the home stretch. The hills outside of Schriber were worse than those in Montreal Harbour and I was crawling up them at about 40kph.

At around 3:30 pm I came around the KOA hill and caught sight of Thunder Bay. The strangest part of seeing town for me wasn’t that we had finally moved back, but that I was starting a new job. Mom and dad welcomed us with refreshments and food and a nice shower. We took it easy and spent Friday unloading (thanks to Heather, Dave and Caleb,) Saturday at Lake Shebandawon for my cousin Jill’s wedding, Sunday at church in the morning with Robin, the Kuchtas and Andersons, then back out to Shebandawon. Did I mention that it only took about $40 in diesel to drive the VW home and boot all around?

Anyway, I’m getting settled in to my new job and looking forward to seeing some friends at the Harbron Hullaballo this Friday at 5:00 pm.