It’s a little odd to be sitting here, looking at these photos, and comparing what they show to what we just experienced. These were already set to go live today and show what was a very typical summer day, but couldn’t be any further from what we saw this weekend. I hope that everyone reading this, who calls Calgary home, made it through okay!
For those that don’t live here or haven’t seen the news, parts of Calgary suddenly found themselves assaulted with heavy rain and hail with very little warning. Streets flooded, cars were smashed, houses were heavily damaged, and power outages were experienced as well.
As it happened, a few of us were helping Mario move and right in the middle of that is when all hell broke loose. We unloaded some things at his condo as the rain first picked up and got out of there just as the parking lot was already filling with water. Partway back to his (now old) place is when the already intense weather got turned up even more; I had to hunt for shelter and managed to get the Suburban under an overpass on the ring road (next to a few dozen other vehicles) after working through nearly zero-visibility rain and hail. Mario and Derrick managed to find cover for Selsun too but not before a wall of water punched it square in the face. Once it died down we were able to find each other and then took the truck to retrace Mario’s route, happily finding both his main grille and fog light bezel which had been knocked out of the bumper along the way. Amazingly neither was smashed, but the bezel does have some indents in it likely from being hit once or twice. All we cared about was the main grille though, given its insane price tag from Ford.
The truck amazingly escaped completely undamaged and Selsun looks to have no permanent damage (bezel aside), but we need to pull the bumper off to properly re-seat it as well as reinstall a variety of pieces behind it which were all knocked out of place by the impact. Everything mechanical seems fine, but cosmetically it’s a bit off at the moment with some parts missing and others very obviously completely out of place in behind.
All that said, Calgary has faced worse (2013 floods, looking at you) and we’ll rebuild again. It’ll take a while for this mess to be fully dealt with but just as with the floods, the city will get there. One step at a time.
Now, back to the originally-planned post. Here’s hoping there are more sunny weekends ahead to keep everyone and everything safe, instead of what we just saw.
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This was somewhat of a last-minute decision for me but ended up being a good one. I’d been intending to run some errands on a recent Saturday following a quick little gathering with some of the Thunderbird Club, but when the idea of a cruise was mentioned I decided that sounded way more fun and decided to join in. The idea was to simply head out of town a bit to Black Diamond, grab some drinks at Marv’s, and then do…nothing.
Our small convoy hit the road at a leisurely pace (because of the classic cars), taking a slightly different route than normal to enjoy the scenery. We even happened to pass by the road where Jason shot Mustard and Ketchup for Performance Ford back in 2014, which I hadn’t been by since that day nearly 6 years ago!
After a while we rolled into town, found some spots for the cars, and grabbed some drinks before finding a patch of grass and watching the world go by. Between the initial morning gathering and then this little outing I don’t think many of us got anything else of note done that day, but who cares? There are enough weekends full of work or errands (or more, like this one) so doing nothing in particular was a pretty good way to spend this Saturday.
-Bill