Adventures in Vars, Ontario

The last couple weeks have been chaotic. Carrie arrived for her first visit to Montreal, Thelma and Francis arrived for their wedding. Fred and I stepped up to the plate as tour guides and tried to give Montreal a fair showing, which doesn't take much. On Thursday, Carrie and I hopped into our rented Hyundai Elantra and sped off in search of Thelma's farm in Navan, Ontario. Armed with our MapQuest directions, we were sure to get there in one piece. We bravely faced the streets and highways of Montreal, marked not only by potholes, but also by the littered remains of cars that just couldn't go on. Ontario license plates scattered across the harsh terrain- drivers that couldn't handle the stress of driving the streets of Montreal. We sped towards Ottawa and finally an hour and a half later made a quick right onto Rockdale Road in the direction of Navan. Arriving downtown Navan, we realized that MapQuest had failed us (or rather we had failed MapQuest- apparently you need to give it a complete address). The directions were incomplete, so we dialed the farm, hoping that Thelma would be able to give us directions...

The night that changed the relationship between Thelma and I began with Rob and Syd, a lot of homemade wine, and a hot tub. Rob and I had already been dating for a couple months, and Thelma and Syd started dating that night. We were up all night and in the morning, Rob drove me to work and took the car to drive Thelma home. He'd never been to her house before, but I assured him that it wasn't far from where my mom lived. And it isn't. But Thelma's famous sense of direction (or lack thereof) resulted in a good hour of driving around SW Calgary until finally one of them saw something that looked familiar and were able to figure out where to go from there. Thelma had been living in that same neighbourhood for most of her life. This was the girl that I called to get directions from downtown Navan to her farm.

First off, Thelma informed us that she didn't in fact live in Navan, so were in the wrong place entirely. Carrie and I laughed and bickered through the nonsensical directions we were given. Thelma told us the addresses on her street weren't sequential, so not to bother looking at them. The house can't be seen from the street, so don't bother looking. We were told to look for a green mailbox, brown cows in the pasture and a corn stand on the corner. As you can imagine, there is no shortage of brown cows or corn stands in the Ontario countryside. After a heated argument about whether or not there was a fire station on Thelma's street, we discovered that she in fact lived in the town of Vars, and not Navan. Is it any wonder MapQuest and I had a fight about what town her street was in?

We eventually arrived. For the next four days, the Bearbrook Resort Inn was home to us at the incredible inflated rate of 100$/night. That night, we took Thelma out for her Bachelorette party with a group of her high school friends. Despite her best efforts to remain sober, Thelma had a few too many martinis at eighteen. For half the night, she sounded a bit like a broken record- proclaiming that she had too much to do to deal with being hung over the next day. By the time we met up with Francis's stag party, she was having fun and had forgotten about her list of things to do. On the way back to the farm, we enjoyed our last 4am breakfast run for quite awhile and dropped Thelma off at home. We told her we wouldn't leave unless she promised to go right to bed, she promised, so we drove back to our 'cozy' room at Bearbrook. I discovered the following day that my good friend Thelma, who I'd known for eighteen years and was about to stand beside as maid of honour, was a liar. She stayed up for hours after we dropped her off- making center pieces and finalizing the seating arrangement.

The wedding was beautiful, despite all of our fears that there was too much left to do. Thelma finally learned how to delegate the day before the wedding and everything came together. The ceremony was relaxed, simple and beautiful all at once. We were attacked by mosquitoes and Francis, ever the gentleman, was chastised during the ceremony for slapping his bride's forehead to save her from a bite. Both Thelma and Francis were so happy all day and it made me think. When I get married, I think we'll elope.