'Vat kindt ouf trees are deese mit such pret-ty colours?'

'The red ones are Maple, the greenish brown ones are Oak, the bright yellow are aspens.'

'Schtop the karr, I vant to zee.'

So I'd stop and we'd walk a nearby path for a minute or so with her collecting leaves and stuffing them in her purse before continuing our journey.

It was a long way to her daughters house and we must've stopped a dozen times to look at various things. Most of the information I was giving her was coming off the top of my head, as in:

'Ollan...vas is dis?' (pointing at a group of granite blocks left over from a dam across a small river.)

'Ah, dis is an olde mill, destroyed in a big flood in 1955.'

'Ach, vat kindt of mill do you tink?'

'ummmm....a 'grist' mill, I tink.'

'Vy you say grist..vat is dis ting 'grist'?

'I don't really know, but the name of the road is 'Grist Mill Road', so I'm pretty sure it was 'grist'.' (what the hell is grist anyway?)

Anyway, we get about halfway there, and it starts to snow. Really big clumps you see early in the season...and the lady just FREAKS!

'V-V-Vat is DIS??!!'

'Oh! It's starting to snow!'

'SCHNOW! Dis ich SCHNOW....SCHTOP DER KARR!!! SCHTOP DER KARRRRR!!!'

Awwww, you had to have been there....this lady was totally enchanted. 50 years dropped off of her in an instant, and she became a little girl again. It wasn't ten seconds after I showed her how to make a snowball that we were having a knockdown dragout snowball fight running through the paths in the woods, scraping snow off of the leaves, while the cab idled alongside the road, all the while laughing ourselves silly. Finally the radio blaring from the inside of the cab brought us out of the spell we were under. It was my dispatcher wondering what was going on; the lady's daughter had called wondering where we were. An hour's ride had turned into twice that. I was in the midst of explaining that we were fighting an early season snow, when the lady winged a snowball straight into my open jacket...

"Uhhh, ok, dispatch, call her back and tell her the roads are.. OOOOH YOU VICKED VICKED VOMAN!!!...hee heeeeee...uh, tell her we're on the way..."