from a sketchy hotel lobby in fightcourt

(with apologies to eric and dan as i stole their email for this post)

I'm in whitecourt alberta right now with matt... waiting for a bus to canmore to meet up with matt's mom and his brother... our bus leaves at 3:20 am. very exciting. note the sarcasm. other than that... i've been planting for the last shift. planted for 5 days, put in about 4500 trees and cleared about 450 bucks after camp costs. it was pretty awesome. i was only hoping to break even. it was a lot of fun! pat, the foreman told me to come back next year so i'm thinking about how to fit it in... would be really awesome. and i'd have a car and get to drive across the country which would be amazing. its a really cool lifestyle out here. the people are really awesome. huge partiers though! i don't know where they get the energy to party after a hard shift planting. the last night of the contract we finished planting at about 2 and went back and showered then went to boston pizza for dinner. drank a bunch there --- (2 team pitchers for 30 bucks) --- and then went to a bar (all 80 people in the camp). we stayed there until about 2:30 and then went back to camp on school buses. i went straight to bed, i was soooooooooo tired i couldn't keep my eyes open but most of the camp stayed up around a camp fire until it was light out... and then stayed up the whole next day without sleep to tear down camp!!!!! seriously.

oh ya, i got to ride in a helicopter too!!! i was soooo excited. i've always wanted to ride in a helicopter and now i've gotten to do it too. i wasn't supposed to be allowed to go to heli blocks (that was the plan coming in) but then one morning they were doing one and pat (foreman) was liike... well y our not really supposed to come but you can. and then he gave me this run down of training. it was aweesome. and we flew out in this really bad storm with all sorts of air pockets and such. good times and a great pilot.

Cutblock... I don't have any pictures of me planting ;(

after canmore matt and i are heading to the okanogan to hopefully go fruit picking. we had a couple other options (spraying herbicides and yard work for the treeplanting company) but we figured this was the best. we're going to go see anne and schomberg too! (well hopefully we haven't really cleared it with them yet lol). after that its off to regina for a week and then we fly into victoria on the 27th to start the WCT on the 28th. then off to AUS on the 6th.

hope all is well