Day 20: Making a Run for the Border

Get THIS!  We come home tomorrow!  We haven’t told the boys yet, so don’t spill the beans in any of your letters.  We’re just going to have “Code Green” first thing in the morning.  Since they never look-up from their games, we will just surprise them by saying “bathroom break” when we are pulling into the parking lot tomorrow at 1:00.  I can’t wait to see the look on their faces!  (I told them we are headed to Ottawa tomorrow…we’ll see how many catch-on!)

Okay, Okay, Okay….The boys have indeed actually figured-out we are pretty close to home.  One of them saw the word “bathroom” on a door and another one noticed all the people stopped saying “aboot” and together they figured-out we weren’t in Manitoba anymore.  It’s been “hold back the reins” time for these ponies.  For some reason they are excited to go home…

This morning was another great morning filled with praise and adoration of your boys.  It is soooo annoying hearing all the great things about these boys all the time.  “These boys were so delightful”, “I didn’t know kids had manners like this anymore” and “Can we keep them so they can teach my kids how to eat at a dinner table” are becoming so commonplace that I have standard responses to each one of them now.  How terrible is that?  Or wonderful, I can’t tell anymore.  After twenty days with these stinky angels, my perception of the world has changed a little. 

So this morning, after we loaded the bus and navigated our way out of the city, we took a few minutes to update the journals and make sure everyone knew how much spending money they had left.  Today, we had a very important task ahead of us:  spending every last nickel of mom and dad’s money at the Duty Free store so we didn’t have to give it back to them.  Unfortunately, good old Prefect PJ forgot to tell the boys what “Duty Free” meant, so the smart and responsible young men left some cushion room in their spending for sales tax.  Luckily, I had a money bag full of Canadian coins and a choir full of coin-collecting boys.  You’d be amazed how many boys are right at zero in their spending money accounts after this stop!

After the task of shopping, it was onto the border.  Getting into Canada was a cinch, so an American boy choir coming back home should be a piece of cake, right?  You would’ve thought we were the Hell’s Angels the way they were questioning every single one of the boys.  I get that there is a point where you need to ensure the safety of America’s borders, but give me a break!  Questioning an eight-year-old with all the proper documentation, dressed in a neat uniform and in need of a bathroom is not a good use of our resources, America.  One of our foreign-born boys had some trouble getting through as well, which is absolute “hog-wash” if you ask me.  It doesn’t get much more innocent than a boy choir…but enough about that.  After about 30 minutes we were back on the bus and rolling…all of us, together.

Lunch was at a neat little museum/picnic area just inside North Dakota before a good, long rest period on the bus, which brought us right up to our arrival in Grand Forks.  The boys are currently singing very well on stage – making the final adjustments before their biggest concert of the year for you, tomorrow afternoon.  I sure hope we have a good crowd for this FULL concert in FULL CONCERT UNIFORM and is AIR CONDINTIONED!  Boo-yeah!  Chalk-one up for planning this time boys and girls!

We are all excited to see everyone!  This has been a tremendous journey for these young men and I am so excited to show them off to you.  I hope the manners stick for a few days, at least.  We’ve been across two of the largest countries in the world,  managed a postal strike, a clogged fuel filter on the bus and a flying fish or two, sung 16 times in the past 20 days and have made friends as ambassadors of Minnesota and the United States everywhere we’ve gone.  (Except for that one crabby lady at the gas station yesterday…She probably won’t be following us on Facebook anytime soon…)  Start blowing-up those balloons and prepping those signs…WE’RE COMING HOME!

One last thing while I have everyone’s attention for one last time.  I would like to thank Nick & Madeleine Griffin, Maria and Belle Carpenter, the Misiura Family, Rodney’s “Sweetie” and my amazing wife Jessica for allowing us to go on these trips with these boys.  The days get long, the time zones mess-up everything, the time to talk is usually short and I’m sure we get moody for things that have nothing to do with whatever is going on back home.  Trust me:  If you had boys asking to go to the bathroom 15 minutes after you JUST left a rest stop, you’d be moody too!  J 

…and of course, the biggest “thank you” of all is for Mary Jo, for putting-up with our terrible schedules, our forgetfulness, keeping the parents calm and reassured that “yes, the blog will be updated as soon as they can find an internet signal” and holding the fort down while we get to go out and play around the world.  You are the best and we could not possibly do as much as we are able to do for these boys without you.

P.J.

PS – There will be no Nordic Choir video this year, I am afraid to say.  The photos just haven’t turned-out the way I needed them to and the video just isn’t coming together at the level I want it to.  We will still have the photo cd available sometime next week for all the boys, but it just won’t contain the usual video.  If you’d like a video next year, please help me convince my wife to get a new camera!  J