Sunday, October 25, 2009

the long the the short of it

It was worth it, but what a wait! This evening we went to the Sukanen Village Halloween event. We've wanted to go for a couple of years but didn't for one reason or another, but this year we were able to. Sukanen Village is a few miles south of Moose Jaw; it's were the steel ship built by Tom Sukanen is now kept and partially restored and where Chrystene shot much of "Sisu". It started at 7:00 but Margaret had been working all day so we didn't get a quick start, leaving Regina at 7:30. On the way, I noticed some interesting light in the sky on the pollution above the Kalium plant outside Belle Plaine. I'm certain it could look very cool with the use of some time exposures (Ryan, perhaps you could take a look sometime). It was a bit rainy so the sky was cloudy; this might have added to the effect. We didn't get much of an image of it, this was just shot by Margaret out the window of the moving car: We arrived at Sukanen Village at 8:20 and I really didn't think there would be many people since the signage was generally so poor. However, I was immediately struck with the image of cars parked throughout the ditch. We parked along the grid road that services it and got into a large line up. I soon realized that the line was moving very slowly, owing to the fact that they were only letting groups of about 12 in at a time, probably every 5 to 10 minutes. At 9:30, William's feet were frozen, owing to the fact that he'd worn his crocs. At 9:45 he wanted to leave but we were at the gate and kept going. Inside the building we were able to warm him a bit as we got placed into a group (I think they placed groups with children in different groups than teenagers+ so that the scare factor could be altered). We were then led out to what I thought would be the tour but was in fact another line. They had the canteen set up as a holding area for the groups where they could buy hot chocolate and snacks. We did so and moved, one table at a time, towards the launch area for the tour. By this point William had really made it clear that he wanted to go home but we persisted and, miraculously, we finally got our turn at 11:10. The tour was quite amusing and mainly consisted of us following our host, the only person with a flashlight, as we walked backwards quickly over very uneven ground and a variety of people yelled from the darkness or jumped out at us. A great lark. William laughed and laughed. He fell asleep in the car on the way home.

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