An ongoing history of almost everything: COUNTRY GRAMMAR

October brought with it some much anticipated visitors; we were excited to have my sister Becky and her son Max to come and stay with us. We were excited that a month shy of his first birthday we'd finally get to meet Max! We had them to ourselves for two weeks. Ryan wanted them to experience some all American Fall activities while they were staying, so he booked tickets for a Halloween Hay Ride, since it doesn't get much more cliche than that.

The description on the website was a tad vague, listing little more than an address, but that didn't deter us. We were expecting a nice ride through the fields of a local farm, an orchard maybe. It was bound to be somewhere quaint and rural and remote. We imagined they'd serve up warm apple cider, or hand out toffee apples, on the crisp autumn afternoon. It was only as we arrived that things started to look a little dubious.

We pulled up at the address. There were no signs to signal that we'd arrived at the right place, and no horses in sight, but there was a ranch house with a small field so things were almost adding up. We noticed a few other cars driving up the dirt road, a few other groups of people standing around looking confused, and so we guessed that we were in the right place. We were probably just a little early.

It was then that the owner of the house came running down her driveway, waving her arms, shrieking that they'd used her address without permission. With shouts of 'how dare they?!' she told us she was very upset; she'd had people knocking on her door for days telling her they'd 'come for the Hay Ride', and it was all very scary and just wrong and maybe she should call the police.

Just when we were thinking we'd been ripped off, one of the confused people who'd pulled up just before us approached and informed us that she'd made a call, and they'd had to move a couple of blocks from the location listed, but the hay ride was still a go. We left the poor ranch owner ranting and raving and drove back towards town. It was in the middle of a residential area that we found the horses and the trailer in which we'd be riding. It was parked on the side of the road next to a four way stop sign. It suddenly became very clear that this wasn't going to be the quaint rural drive we'd been expecting.

The guys running the show were teenage cowboys. Or, maybe they were teenagers dressed up as cowboys; it's hard to say. We climbed aboard the trailer, found a seat on a hay bale, and waited patiently for a break in the traffic so we could pull out. There we were, in the middle of someone's neighborhood, in a wagon trailer, sitting casually on some hay while joggers ran on the path along side us, and couples out for an afternoon stroll looked on in puzzled amazement. The highlight for me was having a pull up and wait our turn at a four way stop. It was hard to stop ourselves from bursting out laughing...at least until we remembered that we'd actually paid for this experience.