America’s Leveling Line (or rather, plane)

Listening To: Rufus Tree: Dying To Live (their new CD which came out just a couple of days ago, it’s pretty good).

Well, I’m back in Chi-town. Time to finish telling you about the trip.

Wednesday we visited the schools of Fergus Falls and the city of Fergus Falls and then drove out to Breckenridge, which is just across the river from North Dakota. The land out there is so flat I coined it “America’s Leveling Line.” Like I mentioned in a previous post, it’s so flat it makes Indiana look like the Rocky Mountains by comparison. Now I offer proof; a panorama shot from the side of the road on our way back from Breckenridge:



Click on the picture to load it in a separate window so that you can zoom in and see just how flat it is. Zoom in on the horizon and you can see that the ground is perfectly level as far as the eye can see. [Edit] Oops, I just found out that Blogger resaved the image as only being 1024 pixels across, so you can't zoom in on it. I'll have to try to figure out a way to post the image elsewhere and let you link to it. [/Edit]

For those of you not from MN, the rest of the state is not at all like that (very hilly). Minnesota also boasts that it has nearly 15,000 lakes, which I sorely miss living in Chicago and Lafayette. Natural bodies of water are awesome!

We stayed the night in Buffalo, MN and then drove to another small town (the name escapes me at the moment) to do a sales call to the schools there. That was a huge headache because we thought our appointment was at 2:00pm (turns out it was 1:30) and things just went downhill from there. At 1:48 I was sitting in Burger King finishing my lunch and my mom frantically runs up to the window (she had been in the car checking her voicemail) and waves for me to rush outside. As soon as I get out there she tells me we are late for the appointment and they don’t have a lot of time to talk to us.

So we jump in the car and rush over to the District Office to meet them. My Mom runs inside while I get a parking spot, but as soon as I was about to park she comes running back outside and tells me we are at the wrong place. The guy we were going to meet with had his office in the High School about a half mile away instead of the District Office. So we frantically drive over there, my Mom runs in and I park. I grab the briefcase containing the laptop and head inside. I find my way to the office lobby and she’s sitting there waiting for the guy to come get us. As we were sitting there we were talking about how just about everything was going wrong, and my mom says “What else could possibly go wrong with this appointment?” Just then, her cell phone rings and it’s the guy we were going to meet telling her that he wants to have the meeting at, you guessed it, the District Office! So we rush back over there and once again she goes in while we park. Well, we were finally at the right place and he leads us to the meeting room where there are six others that we are presenting to. Then we find that about half of them only have 20 minutes before their next meeting (we’re 45 minutes late by now), so we give one of the fastest sales presentations we ever have and they seemed to really like it. A couple of them were sitting with us until 3:30 asking more questions. I have a feeling they’re pretty well sold on RevTrak.

Then comes one of the best parts of the trip (and the one I had been looking forward to all week). We drove back to the Twin Cities and spent the night with the Pedro Family. The Pedro’s are old family friends that date back to when we first moved to White Bear Lake when I was 5. In fact, my brother and I used to go over to their house some days for afternoon nap when we were little. They are a homeschooling family with 10 kids, spaced out in age from 19 to under-1. So I spent the majority of my time from when we got to their house to when we left the next morning playing with the kids, especially the little ones. Here’s a shot with me, Joshua (8), Anna (6), and Jeremiah (3) all stacked up in the back yard:



And another similar shot with me, David (12), and Joshua (8) stacked up, with Anna (6), Timothy (10), and Jeremiah (3) lined up along the back:



This is Carissa (14) and baby John (one of the most mild-mannered babies in the world):



Our Moms together:



So yeah, that’s the Pedro family (I didn’t even include pictures of Mr. Pedro, Tom, Daniel, and Rebecca). We had a blast. I especially spent a lot of time with Joshua (who wants to learn to fly), Anna (one of the cutest little girls ever), and Jeremiah (he’s crazy, and he has more energy than a supernova). Hopefully I will get a chance to see them again before the summer’s over.

I thought it might also be nice to throw in a picture of the graduate, so here you go:



BTW, in answer to Amy’s question, the Scott I was referring to in the joke was my brother. Since the majority of you won’t have any chance to ask about the joke, I’ll just tell you:
Q. Do you know what a polygon is?
A. A dead parrot.

Anyways, I just finished Life, The Universe, and Everything, the 3rd Hitchhiker book. Tonight I’m taking my mom to see the movie. That’s about it for now, so have a good one.