2005 Prairie Tour Final Journal One Month Later

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Whew! How the time flew by! About a month ago today, Prairie Tour members were standing with their feet in Good Spirit Provincial Park Lake waters, singing and laughing and saying their good-byes to one another under the magnificent prairie sunshine.   Our final week of tour and wrap-up evaluation time brought us many smiles, surprises and sweet memories…

June 14-15, 2005

After having taken over Wynyard Composite School for the weekend, we finally got a chance to actually present to and workshop with the kids at the school.   It was a full day, including bookmaking goodness at lunch!  From there we pedalled our way through the rain to Foam Lake, after all meeting up at the local bakery and piling the jars and jars of on-sale peanut butter into our already overloaded car (what's one more jar, huh ..), we unpacked into our new home for the next couple of days, Foam Lake Elementary School, complete with a band room and another lovely staff room with Yeh! Couches!

June 16-17, 2005

Foam Lake entertained us, and we entertained ourselves with more wacky worlds, enchanted forest, a presentation for the junior high school kids over at Foam Lake Composite School, the first showing of the wolf and sheep game facilitated by Ms. Andrea (she's a great one at the energizer games, they are highly under rated!) and our night would not have been complete without the visit from the local security to stop by to graciously turn off the screech screech screeching school alarm!   Oh and did we ever enjoy Mark's intercom voice … even the announcement made at midnight … yes of course we enjoyed that one!

June 18-19, 2005

Then we were off to Springside…

How can we forget Springside! Wow! First of all, what a beautiful short ride! Many folks found themselves enjoying an afternoon nap with their quick noon arrival, some even decided to pedal on up to Good Spirit Provincial Park, 25 km for an dip in the lake, while others slowly made their way to what looked like the most pristine campground we would get to adopt for a couple of days.

But appearances are not always as they seem …

As the sun slowly faded in the sky, the bugs, quickly decided they would join us for the night. So it was another set 3 tents up and attempt consensus through tent screens meeting!  Oh the dedication! But the fun was just beginning … morning was one spoonful of oatmeal, swat a mosquito, another spoonful, swat swat! We thought things couldn't get worse! But oh did they ever! Following a wonderful presentation, with quick the compliments-that-made-us-beam from Principal Jason Gorden at Springside Elementary … we sat down to a feast from a table full of potluck lunchtime snacks! Dessert about to be served, who runs into the gymnasium, but a sopping wet Anne Thomson.  "Otesha" she yells, in the calmest voice she could manage at the time, "I hate to interrupt, but you need to come out into the hall, RIGHT NOW". 

Come to find out that the pristine campsite had, following a morning of pouring rain, had turned into a river! 2 tents were completely flooded and the rest quickly on their way there.

Luckily, the kind folks at Springside would not see us left out in the rain, especially with the hurricane warnings looming, so we packed up our things, along with the help of some local pick-ups, got back to the school, laid out our possessions to dry out, dried ourselves off and got back to work … ate some cupcakes, and got into some bookmaking with almost every kid in that school!   We had a blast!  The sun came out and the day was turning around!

June 20-22, 2005

Tailwind with us, it was a short ride to yip-yip-yippy our final town, Yorkton, Saskatchewan!  We would have the wonderful fortune of spending the next few days at St. Michael's school, what wonderful hosts.  On Sunday, our final day off, we were delighted by the lovely dinner shared with us by teachers and parents, which included barbequed veggie kebabs (ummm.. can't beat barbequed tofu) and not one, but TWO ice cream pies for dessert! Whoot whoot!   Our taste buds were telling us our time in Yorkton was going to be a blast!

With yummy muffins and juice provided by the school in our bellies, Mel's ride into the gym kicked started off the presentation on Monday morning, followed by wacky worlds and enchanted forest and workshops workshops workshops.   We got through the day and even had time to run through the new food scene AGAIN that night! 

We awake to the 'Tuesday-is-gonna-rock' schedule!  Ms. Christi as route planner had been outdoing herself, putting her artistic talents to work with amazing host thank you cards and schedules for us!  It's 5:30am and we see the announcer setting up, smell more muffins and coffee and we are up!  It is our radio debut on a local Yorkton station.   A few Otesha sound bites and we are of course promoting the good ol' One Tonne Challenge, the lovely 'Junk to Funk' book, and revelling in what has been an amazing ride… and who knew that our morning would turn into a sing-along lead by the music teacher on piano.   Whew!  Tuesday was just beginning and it was already rockin'! Check it out at: http://stmichaels.yorktoncatholicschools.com/activities.html

It was time to get inside, because we had our bike presentation to get on the go.   We had been working hard on this new presentation, and it proved to be a riot, including a bike fashion show, and a rare meeting of non-other than Ms. Careless and Ms. Hopeful!  Anna, Anne, Christi, Karen and Laura definitely deserve a year's worth of tailwinds and pumped tires for that one! 

We didn't have long to stick around following the bike giveaway to some lucky kid and the kind kind applause, because we were off to St. Paul's for our final wacky worldin' and enchanted forestin', wow did we ever look hot in those gym equipment room costumes! Then some donated pizza for lunch and de-de-de our second to last presentation and the final performance from Meghan-o-rama and do-Remi! Wow did those kids ever get rock out at Mama E … they are definitely gonna start a water revolution .. yah!

And here we are: it's our last morning and we awake to the sound of thunder, the power's out and through the library window we see black storm clouds heading our way.   It would all be fine, if we knew we didn't have to bike 50km that afternoon.  Oh well, the show must go on; it is our final presentation at Sacred Heart High School. 

We are greeted by the wonderful Helene Tremblay-Boyko and Peace and Development Just Youth Group, http://youth.devp.org/aframes.html where we get in some final book making action and sharing of knowledge about why we are all committed to social justice. Those kids have done some fantastic things and wow you should have heard their creative payments! We walk into an auditorium of Sacred Heart students, and wow did they think we were a bunch of stand-up comedians or what, they thought we were a riot; we have never heard such laughter.   That was great, and to top it all off the Just Us Youth Group had decided to give us their earnings from the year to Otesha, wow, we were ever blown away, with our own laughter, tears and some tugs on our heart strings.

And-what-do-ya-know … the looming storm had turned into a beautiful blue sky and sunshine for our final ride to Good Spirit Provincial Park .   There was some stops along the way, with lots of ice cream and candy consumed to arrive at our campsite, we even had some greeters to welcome us their, none other than, hundreds and hundreds of blood-thirsty mosquitoes.   You seriously could not stand outside for more than a few moments without them going for any bare skin you had.   Hey! We even have Remi's-avoid-the-mosquitos-while-making-a-cheese-bun-and-jam-supper on video to prove it!   But hey we've endured floods, 140km days of headwinds, and some apathy and cynicism along the way, we could endure this! right?

Right. Following our morning meeting in the golf course basement and a meeting go-around to decide if GSPP would be our place of choice to do our wrap-up work, we got to into some evaluation work!   Our last weekend of reflection turned into sweetness, with staying up late watching a slideshow of tour photos, supersquads cooking up a storm (including even a treat of guacamole on our final night), an awards ceremony, fun closing rituals and lots of hugs and good tears.

It has been quite the ride, who knew that bringing together 17 kids from across the country, after only 2 months on the road together could turn us into such a little family… It's been one month down the line since we left Good Spirit Lake, we have dispersed, and gotten ourselves back to our lovely abodes for now, but the jam has been spread thick and we are all Otesh-i-fied, feeling proud, legs a little stronger, heads a little wiser and a roll of snapsnots from a couple of months of puuuuuuuuure goodness in our heads.

Mel Jellett and the rest of the 2005 Prairie Tour Team