Don't assume that snow will hold you up

Monday:
Today we said goodbye to Barrett, Elaine, Ella, Dale, and Barons to put 600 kilometers under the wheels of the van. It's actually nice to relax after a very, very stressful week. I'm gonna miss Barrett, cause he's freakin' hilarious, and Dale, cause he thinks everything is freakin' hilarious.
One thing I will miss from the prairies is the sky. It's so huge and moody. You go outside, and all you see is field and sky. Every kind of cloud in every size and shape blankets the pale blue. And the sunsets...oh, the sunsets. The entire sky comes alive with colour; golden fingers of sinshine painting orange, pink and gold in the west while an audience of pink-tinged clouds watches from the east. You just want to stand there and spin so you can feel all the colours. It's beyond words.
I think this tour will be a lot of hellos and goodbyes, meeting a lot of people and maybe even making some friends. The only constants will be us (the team, the family) and God. Already I've been blessed by the hospitality and generosity of God's family...it's amazing. They feed you and bless you...and feed you, and feed you... Last night, I met a couple with a very interesting story; he had grown up in Saudi Arabia, she in India. They met in India, married in Switzerland, moved to the States, then to Canada, lived in many different cities, and are now pastoring in a tiny little town in southern Alberta. Pretty crazy.

Tuesday:
Well, Ajeep (the van, who is East Indian) made it from Barons all the way to Revelstoke, where we stopped to get gas. Ten feet from the gas pump, he stalled and refused to start again. Every time we tried to start him, he sputtered and sputtered but didn't go. We ended up calling AMA and getting towed to the nearest mechanic shop. Jeremy and Rhonda went in the tow truck, while Reneyah, Jonathan and I headed to a restaurant to get some comfort food and wait for their call. When they called and gave us directions to the shop, we stepped out of the restaurant and stared down Trans-Canada Highway 1. We needed to cross it in order to get to our destination, but the crosswalk was an entire block away. So, of course, we jaywalked. Unfortunately, another obstacle lay in our way; the median. I didn't want to go around it, and it was directly in our path, so the obvious choice was to cross over the waist-high snow. So, disregarding Reneyah's protests, I climbed over the big pile of dirty snow that had been plowed off the highway and promptly stepped into snow that came up the middle of my thigh. I had nowhere to go, so I took another step forward and couldn't move. "I'm stuck!" I yelled. "I'm stuck!" Reneyah stared laughing, and Jonathan came to help me out. We were almost successul when I noticed vehicle coming around the corner. "Car!" I yelled. "Jonathan, A car!" I pulled him a little further up the bank so that he wouldn't get hit (cause that would really suck). All of a sudden, Reneyah ran toward the vehicle shouting " A bus! It's a community bus!" I finally made it over the snow, and we all hopped on Revelstoke's only bus. We met a little old lady who had just come back from bowling, who told us some of her life story before the driver dropped us off at the auto shop, where we got some strange looks from Jeremy and Rhonda.
The moral of the story is: don't assume that snow will hold you up. Turned out that the van had bad gas; well, not so much gas as it was water. We stayed the night in Revelstoke and continued on the next day.

Wednesday:
We've gone through the Rockies, and I feel inadequte to describe them to you. This is partially because I saw them from the back seat through the cracked windshield of a semi-clean van, but also because they're just hard to describe. They're more majestic and impressive than they are beautiful; no one colour or characterisitic defines them. On our way back through, I'll take a window seat and try to put some words to them. If you haven't seen them, do.
I'm not sure who said it, but this is a paraphrased quote from one of the Christy videos:

"A girl can be beautiful like a mountain or a tree or a river. She doesn't have to be a flower."