ATC 40 - Page 16

Cards 1..4 were sent from recently discovered family members.

Cards 5 and 6 were sent from my childhood minister and his wife.

They were from Canada and he took many youth group trips to go canoing in the Boundary waters between Minnesota and Ontario. I was part of his last tour, with my friend Camel. Two other youth group members fell in love on the trip, married, and have a couple of kids now.

We camped for a few days. The day we returned was raining and I was paired with a canoe partner who was just miserable and depressed and crying. I felt for her not liking the miserable conditions but she wasn't doing anything useful (like paddling) to get us out of the situation. My friend Camel had a much better trip back, as she had fallen in love with M. Shades. That relationship didn't last, but it did give us giggles for quite a while because he called he Bunny Toes. I had a crush on both Rosy Cheeks and Max, but they both liked someone else.

The other interesting aspect of the trip was that one of the two vans broke down when we were just 100 miles out from home on our way to Minnesota. The timing gear fell out. Rather than turn back, we voted to carry on in the one good van. Black. Its only windows were the windshield and the front doors. Absolutely hollow inside. A delivery truck, really. We pushed all of our gear to the walls and sat on it or in front of it, an a large circle with our feet to the middle. We slept and rode that way, all the way to Minnesota and then back again. We took several stretch breaks.

Card 7 is from Hello Nurse. She was a nursing student at a nearby college, in the obstetrics class. Just as student teachers work with a class, student OB nurses work with pregnant families. We signed up for the program through our OB doc and were assigned Hello Nurse. She and her teacher gave us extra visits, HN can to a Lamaze class with us, can to an OB appointment with us, and attended the birth of Gonzo, even though he was twelve days late and made some of HN's coursework late as well.

Cards 8 and 9 are mine, sent to the minister and his wife. They returned them. I guess I wasn't clear that they should keep them. Oh, well.