It's a Mystery to go on Tour - Episode 61

We had a bus tour visit Crazy 8 Barn this week. It was a mystery tour from Chicago.

That is a curated few days where the exact location and each event is a surprise to the participants.

As we waited for their arrival, we joked about them arriving at the Canada US. Border saying they didn’t know where they were going.

Could this be a hostage taking of 50 American Senior Citizens? Who would pay to get them back?

Find out how this event went and Susanne recalls the near-misses and successes of this bus tour event to southwestern Ontario. 

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My website to join in our barn quilt painting experiences is www.crazy8barn.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Happy2B Canadian podcast. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, a writer who lives in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Each week I share an original, very short story that will have you laughing and reflecting on the simple moments of our lives. Now, on to today's episode. Happy to be Canadian, Episode 61. It's a mystery to go on a tour. We had a bus tour come to the Crazy Farm last week. It was a mystery tour from Chicago. That is a curated few days where the exact location and each event is a surprise to the participants. As we waited for their arrival, we joked about them arriving at the Canada U.S. border, saying they didn't know where they were going. Could this be a hostage taking of fifty American senior citizens? Who would pay to get them back? When they arrived at our stop in the early afternoon, a few of the tourists said that there indeed had been some consternation at the border until the tour guide explained the concept to the border control agents who were puzzled that the travelers didn't know their destination. Suffice it to say that the tour participants had never foreseen painting a barn quilt in an octagon barn in rural Ontario. Never before in their lives had they thought that this was a possibility. As a sleek black bus with darkened windows looking more like a mafia camping van than a lighthearted mystery tour came into sight, our excitement mounted. We were ready. Manfred and I had spent many days setting up the barn and preparing the projects so that they could be completed in a couple of hours. The tables were all set up on the second floor loft of the barn. We had a plan, but it dissolved just a moment or two after the bus pulled into our parking lot. As the bus driver stepped out of the bus, he opened the side baggage compartment. From my welcoming position, I could see that he was lifting out a wheeled walker. Ooh, I thought. The stairs are easy to maneuver even for people with limited mobility. Relax, I told myself. We always accommodate everyone. Then I saw the bus driver lift out another walker. I squinted through the sunshine into the dark hole of the bus's baggage compartment. I couldn't discern the number of walkers, but there was a mega maze of handles and wheels. I chastised myself about not explaining the setup of the barn to the tour guide. I tried to remember if she had asked me about accessibility. Maybe it was just assumed these days. Unfortunately, we have faced the restrictions of historical reconstruction combined with a lack of funds to ever install an elevator. It has been a spot of concern for me for many years. As we herded everyone up the stairs, we offered to set up a table or two downstairs, but by the time I headed down with the first two panels, all the tour participants had clambered up the stairs. Before the event, I put out a request in my newsletter asking for help during the stay. Five volunteers came forward. Only one had painted a couple of barn quilts with me. One claimed she was not crafty at all. One had a ton of teaching and art making experience. Others just wanted to be part of the event. I can't tell you how grateful I was that they came forward. With only a short introduction on how to tape the boards to control the painting of the blocks, they each took over the direction of more people than I handle in a regular barn quilting workshop. Fifty people who were surprised they were looking at a pencil outlined pattern on a metal square is completely juxtaposed to eight people who have reserved a spot to paint a barn quilt at one of our workshops. First, my usual eight participants are not surprised that they are painting a barn quilt. Many of them have been yearning to do this for quite a while. Years even. Some, maybe most of them, had no idea what a barn quilt was. Almost all of them had not painted a picture in decades, and a couple of them had never considered doing so. The two gentlemen who had never painted a picture before were in their eighties. One stood valiantly for two hours, his cane perched nearby, and with a shaky hand taped and painted a pretty good looking barn quilt. The other man stalled after placing two pieces of tape on the board, crossed his arms in defiance, and refused all help. His wife commented that she had to deal with this all the time. She carried on with her quilt painting and asked for help at the end to fix up some smudges. Some people in the group followed instructions and others marched ahead, putting their own signatures on the design. Midway through the event, as the demand on the volunteers mounted, Manfred was seconded to the paint dispensing area, and he wondered if his collar blindness would hamper his performance. No, I said. Some tour participants gobbed paint on their board like they were making a mud adobe wall, and others brushed thin, even strokes to create a smooth surface. Some dried their paint between coats, and others left damp patches which under the next coat burbled up into a blistered surface. Volunteers who an hour earlier had languished in the sunshine as we sat on the back deck of the crazy ape barn were hip-hopping from table to table now. Our organizational plans had all but disappeared as the painters found their own strides. At one point, one participant had taken their board to the plastic tablecloth, and when they picked it up, all the paleophenalia of the other participants came up with it. Water and paint sprayed in different directions, brushes and knives slid out of place. All I heard was someone say, I'll get the paper towels. I never looked in the direction of the incident. I've hosted enough of these events to know that once it starts, you are along for the ride. The secret is to be prepared as you can be, roll with the punches, have a first aid kit, and hope there are no injuries. As we neared the end of the session, I was moving from table to table with a fine brush and a pot of white paint, touching up minor paint blades and some really big oops smears. A burly man with an old European accent asked for some touch-up paint to finish his barn quilt. I looked at his panel and could not recognize the pattern. He had painted on both sides of the tape shapes, creating a mosaic pattern reminiscent of medieval tile designs. I said nothing. He touched up his artwork and then moved from table to table, fixing other people's lines. While he might have been more comfortable with a fat cigar in his hand, he was agile with the paintbrush. I started calling him my fixer. And then the bus driver stepped into the barn. His appearance might have been missed by everyone except the tour guide. All of a sudden, the group started to disappear, their exit more coordinated than their arrival. As they said goodbye, we presented them all with a grab bag filled with tokens of friendship from all levels of government and local businesses. As the bus drove away, I remembered a conversation I had with my daughter earlier that same day. She is a first responder and faces emergency situations every day at work. I told her that I was a bit nervous to be hosting so many people to create a barn quilt in such a short period of time. She reminded me that we were just painting shapes on a board. Not much could really go wrong. And not much did. The next morning, most of it was funny, even if it was a bit of dark humor. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Happy to Be Canadian. If you would like to receive an email each Saturday morning that features new short stories and more, you can sign up on my website, www.crazy8barn.com. If you would like to meet me in person and discover another way that we tell our rural stories, please join me at a Barn Quilt Painting Workshop at our beautiful eight-sided barn in Palmyra, Ontario, along the north shore of Lake Erie. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Crazy8 Barn. If you are an Apple Podcast listener and enjoyed this podcast, I would appreciate it if you could leave me a favorable review. And that lets Apple know that Happy to Be Canadian is a valuable podcast and it shares it with other potential listeners. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, and I'm Happy To Be Canadian.