Rodos on the Highway - We Spent a Lot of Time Out There

I spent a good deal of late nights at Rodos on the highway. There where open 24 hours until they closed for good. They only shut down on Christmas day. It was a place that many people I know in Moose Jaw went to and socialized.

After the bar let out at 2am, they would get a spike in customers and people would order food and coffee. We would hang out and talk about everything that came to mind and a lot of jokes where said, and a lot of gossip was spread.

The strange part of it is how many people would come with their kids until midnight. I'm talking little children not yet in school even. We joked that we where going to sell t-shirts in children's sizes that said, "raised at Rodos."

The staff where always friendly as heck and always chatted with people. They where good with bringing the coffee around and it did not matter that you had been there 5 hours and it was you 24th cup of coffee, they still filled your cup for one small price. To be honest if we where there for more than 2 hours we always ended up with food. Often it was pizza for the group or crazy bread. Pastry was out of the question as they would let it sit out until it was dedicated. But the food from the kitchen was always amazing.

There would be once a year when the bible collage let out it's "Youth Quake" - a large number of youth attended - and a couple of hundred people would stop in for gas and snacks for the road. It would be hours before they all cleared the place.

One time in particular that I recall was in May. We where not expecting snow, in fact we did not even have jackets on. Well I looked out the window and saw that it has dumped a tone of snow on us. It was mid afternoon and it was up to the bumper of the car and we where screwed.

Well there was only one other table at the time and it was a woman and her son. Well she freaked out when I mentioned we where trapped and she has a terrible seizure. The ambulance was called and the city sent out a plow to guide the ambulance there. Well we wasted no time in taking off and following the plow back into the city. It was rough getting home in town, but we managed it.

There was also the computer users group that went there once a month. We all had a scanner and exchanged frequencies to program into them. We traded software and had a great time. Often there would be 20 or so people there. The one time we stayed after and collected all of the empty creamers and there where a tone of them. We made a castle out of them 2 feet tall and at midnight when the new staff came on the young lady came with coffee to the back room and said loudly, "how the fuck long have you been here"? Well we told her what was up and she laughed. She though we had been there for an entire day with the amount of creamers.

To say the least, I'll never experience anything like the times we had out there. There have been other places and other people, but it's never been as good a time. It was literally part of the culture of my generation in Moose Jaw. I miss it and when it closed so did that chapter of our lives.

Note: this is post #4666 and I went out of my way to save this post for it. Peace be with you always.