i'd start at the beginning but the beginning's not what's important. it's the middle where the meat is just like a sandwich.
the middle of april was our trip to calgary. a lot went down on the trip and not all of it good but as far as things go in my life it was a trip that is pretty news worthy. as i said the month started out pretty boring just as any other month in my life generally starts out, and from there it continued on.
on april the 16th however our trip began. you see lara's cousin juanita happened to be getting married on the 19th of april and so before this lara began to arrange our trip out. as the trip ended up coming together, it was lara and myself, lara's cousin's scott and alecia and alecia's boyfriend dustin all in a rental mini van. the trip out itself wasn't all that interesting, we stopped twice (maybe three times) and managed to make pretty good time. we arrived in calgary in the evening, sometime around ten-thirty or eleven. everyone excluding myself went out to the bar (the back alley) to hang out with lara's cousin's, dion and juanita. myself, however; i ended up hanging out with jeff and stinky due to the fact that i called jeff first thing once we got into town. so far so good.
i think it was on the second night that dion and i went out to the millenium park on our bmxes. dion fortunately had just gotten a new bike shortly before our arrival, and was eager to get back into riding again. dion, according to all that i've heard was quite the racer back in the day, so i was pretty stoked to see him getting back into things (he's a pretty good snowboarder as well). needless to say both of us were a bit rusty (and intimidated) being our first night riding at the millenium park. i didn't hit all that much the first night we were there, i mainly just got used to riding the park again.
for those of you who don't know the millenium park is frickin' huge, bigger than i remember it even. all in all it turned out to be pretty fun i think. lara also got a parking ticket while sleeping in the van waiting for us.
the wedding itself was pretty good for a wedding. the service was short and not too big, the snacks at the church were good and the reception wasn't overly long.
after the wedding dion and i had decided to hit the park again and i had also invited jeff and stinky out to watch, as well alecia and dustin decided to come along. jeff and stinky at the time we decided to leave were already at chad's (yet another acad photo grad) house having a small get-together. so on the way to the park we all decided to stop in and have a visit with chad and everyone there. while there stinky almost managed to throw a bottle through the front windshield of chad's old car, but it was chad himself who finally pulled it off. after that and then my misfortune of almost losing chad's cat, we headed off to the skatepark.
fortunately for me the previous outting to the park had given me a pretty good feel for everything again and so my riding was at least a little bit better. for the most part everyone just toured around and tried riding my bike, dion's bike and my skateboard. stinky almost learned how to do barspins, and dustin's semi-intoxicated skateboarding wasn't bad. even my skateboarding wasn't bad (for me), i dropped in and rode the cloverleaf bowl and a few other things. i was managing a few peg stalls and grinds around the park, and i even managed to air the spine for everyone. airing a spine isn't normally anything hard for me but in an unfamilliar concrete park with a number of friends watching it takes on a little more challenge (i had also forgotten my knee and shin pads, and it was also rather cold, but those are just excuses).
unfortunately this is where things began to get awry, and more unfortunately stay that way. at this point everyone was either riding or watching someone else ride around in the park. dion had run into someone he knew and was on the far side of the park by the spine, i had started skating the small bowl on the opposite side of the park and my bike and everyone else was hanging out in the middle of the park. while i was skating alecia started riding around on my bike and dustin was cheering her on as she took a few laps around the park. one of her laps however was cut short. while at the far end of the park i saw alecia come riding by on my bmx and i thought to say something to her like "be careful", but she was past me before i finished the idea to get the words out of my mouth (i don't think that they would have done much good anyway). i then watched her as she circled around the beginners bowl and headed back for the middle of the park. unluckily enough for alecia the park has a rectangular bowl of decent depth right in the ecentre of the park that she wasn't aware of. i watched her travel throught the beginners bowl, across the flat between the two bowls, and without hesitation or warning, drop straight (face first) into the deeper coped central bowl. never having ridden a bmx before and never having been to the park before was a pretty good combination of factors with which to cause a severe and trumatic accident. alecia, after coming over the bowl's coping, had gone straight over and landed on her face causing the entirety of the impacts force to directly effect her face and neck. the second i saw alecia headed over the coping i immedeately pushed my board as fast as i could go over to the bowl. when i arrived dustin and a number of skaters were already trying to help alecia and get the bike out from under her. the force of the impact had the effect of knocking five of alecia's lower teeth out, breaking her jaw, breacking her cheek bones, splitting her lip, forehead and nose as well as damagaing some of the vertabrea in her neck. none of these injuries were all that apparent at the time due to the massive amount of blood pouring out of her head. pretty much everything at this point was chaos, lara and i went and got dion while everyone was dealing with alecia, the only thing i'm sure of communicating to dion was "blood", i didn't seem to be able to express any other words at the time. also jeff's cell phone died just as he tried to call 911, luckily however a skateboarder was already on the pay phone calling ems. stinky, dustin and a few skaters (and later dion) tried to help out alecia while the ambulance was on it's way, and dion called his parents in hopes of getting ahold of alecia's parents, who had also come out for the wedding. after the ambulance arrived and took alecia away (dustin rode along), stinky cleaned up some of the mess and buried one of alecia's teeth and then lara, dion and i headed to the hospital while jeff and stinky ended thier night.
the next six hours for dustin, lara, dion and myself were spent in the hospital waiting room. lara and dion left dustin and myself after the third time trying to get ahold of alecia's parents on the phone and went to bring them back with the mini van, which they managed to do. alecia spent about a week or so in the hospital getting surgeries done and actually ended up coming out pretty well, considering the fact that she suffered a broken face.
the next day it was just lara and i in the van, as we headed out of calgary after an easter egg hunt with the rest of lara's family at dion's parent house. after heading out of town lara and i drove to blackie to have dinner with my sister and her husband and to pick up our new computer which robin and larry had built for us. after supper we were on the road again getting into cranbrook and my dad's place somewhere around midnight. then the next day after rescuing lara's futon and some of my junk we were on the road again. we took the number three highway on the way back, which turned out to be a very scenic as well as pretty fast route to take as we ended up getting back home to north vancouver sometime around eight thirty or nine if i remember correctly. how's that for a trip.
in other news: craig also decided to move back to the greater vancouver area, mainly to my detriment.
i also finally got to go riding with paul again. last friday paul and i took our "child size bicycles", as paul puts it, and hit two parks and the cambie banks.