Home Again

Well, Keith is coming home a week early since there is really nothing they can do out there in Nowhere North Dakota. He says he has actually enjoyed the trip, seeing a different way of life and meeting new people, but Boss Bob has hated every minute of it. Except for the part about playing hooky and driving to Montana and the part about the Indian Casino.

He'll be bringing pictures home with him, pictures I'm very interested in seeing, since I've never been to Nowhere North Dakota and lived in a Man Camp.

There is a town about 20 minutes away from where they are staying, a town that normally has about 14000 people and is the county seat and the ninth largest town in all of North Dakota or something like that, a town that has a Walmart. Since the oil boom in those parts started, prices have skyrocketed and there isn't a spare room to be had in the whole town. Keith and Bob checked into the price of a hotel room and it was $700.00 a night. If it weren't for the temporary trailer houses in the Man Camps, all of these guys working out there would be sleeping in their cars. It really sounds like the Gold Rush days when you could charge whatever you wanted for a gold pan and a hot bath and those miners were glad to pay it.

He had a long talk with his boss about the future of their shop here in Wasco, and it doesn't look good. They have enough railcars to work for a few months and a contract to fulfill that probably won't be renewed when it runs out around October, and then Savage will probably decide to shut the whole shebang down. Unless something comes up before the bitter end, Keith will stay on and then go on unemployment until he finds another job. Hopefully by then there will be another job somewhere. Maybe closer to town so that he's not spending so much in gas every week to get there.

Anyway, I've been keeping plenty busy this past 5 days and kind of enjoyed my little vacation.