After walking blindly into one of the biggest nightmares of my life with the giant gopher and the room full of pyramid power gopher roadkill devotees, I thought I’d stick around Regina for an extra day or two so I could get some background on the leader of this misguided cult.  I needed to find out his name.. I needed to find out where he lived….. I needed to put my brain to work and have a little fun, the kind of fun that Saint Peter shakes his head and questions you about when you show up at the pearly gates… THAT kind of fun… This wasn’t over….. Not by a long shot!!!

I made a promise to myself that I’d say nothing to my dentist buddy about his wife’s new group of friends, she was a nice person and all but, at this point in her life, maybe a bit lost.  I was going to tell him that, in my opinion, he needed to simply give her a bit of space…. Hey, I didn’t marry her, let the buyer beware! I knew that if I was supportive and understanding about Squeaky’s horrible trip to meet his maker, my friend’s wife would probably tell me what I needed to know about the cult leader, I’d pry it out of her.  She’d start singing like a meadowlark and give me his home phone number and address, where he worked and his boss’s name and number too…… For the next day or so I made it my life’s purpose to find out EVERYTHING !!! I think it was time to turn on the recording app in the new cel phone I picked up that morning, hide it in my shirt pocket and help her make dinner.. ooooo, I’m such a sensitive guy, ooooooo I love helping out in the kitchen….. oooooo I love gophers…….. ooooooo I love chopping up carrots…… What is the giant gopher’s first name???? ………. That’s right, nice and easy see, one name at a time, see.. One little bit of information at a time………….. This would take a day or two, but I’m a patient man….. Reeeeeeal patient!!!!!

Being a dentist is a vocation in life that requires a whole lot of compassion tempered with a thick skin which comes in handy whenever the 10 year old patient’s blood curdling screams echo through the clinic.  You have to continue scraping, gouging, needling, hacking and stabbing at those nasty rotting gums and molars so little junior can go back home and survive another 6 months on a strict diet of caramel, sucrose, dextrose, corn syrup, fudge, taffy, fructose, sugar cookies, icing, brownies, cotton candy, bubble gum, Colas, chocolate bars, ice cream, gummy bears, gummy worms, gummy cola bottles, licorice ( both red and black), angel food cake, halloween candies, peanut brittle and pie……… But you know for sure that the next time the poor little fellow gets dragged into your dentist’s office he’ll take one look at your grinning face and shrivel up in horror because he knows the scraping, gouging and hacking is going to start all over again……….. I can’t help but think that dentists must go home at night and reach for the Scotch bottle before dropping the car keys on the kitchen counter…… I know I would, and thats just what my dentist friend did when he came home that night..

After dinner we sat on his back deck and started the evening off right with a few ounces of 30 year old Whyte and Mackay.  This is a blended Scotch which is a bright golden mahogany in color and smoother than a 10 dollar vanilla milkshake. Now I am a fairly stubborn, uppity, single malt drinker but the first sip told me to shut up, sit back and learn something for a change.  What came next was maybe the most memorable part of my trip so far, and if you’ve been paying any attention to this blog you’ll know that there will probably be a few of this trip’s memories that will cause me to scream in my sleep until the day my heart finally blows up.  My friend brought out a table top humidor, placed it on the small cedar table between our chairs and I swear I heard a chorus of Hallelujahs sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir when he opened the lid.  He had been aging a box of Cohiba Double Coronas EL 2003 and said that tonight was the night to finally taste one with his oldest and dearest friend…. Me…  I felt a lump form in my throat when I inhaled the beautiful barnyard aroma wafting out of the humidor and I think I had a tear in my eye when he asked me to pick one.

There are reasons why aged cigars taste the way they do.  The time spent in the humidor allows the leaves to further ferment and go through many evolutions of flavor and if you’ve started out with the best quality tobacco possible, you’ll end up with priceless cigars after a few years of aging. A few more years and you’ll end up with what we were smoking that night on the back deck. This incredible double corona had all of the usual Cohiba traits but the grassiness was mellower, the pepper was sweeter, and the bean flavors were simply perfect.  Three or four drinks later and I felt that I was happier than I had ever been in my life and my dentist buddy said the same, there we were, two of the best friends that ever sat on a back deck drinking aged Scotch whiskey and smoking pricey, aged, limited edition cigars.  I loved this guy maybe more than I ever loved my brothers, parents or even Dave Ridgway, of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the day he kicked the winning field-goal to take the Grey Cup away from the Hamilton Tiger-Cats with 9 seconds left on the clock, back in ‘89.

With love in my heart, Scotch in my glass and a priceless Cohiba in my hand I thought that maybe now would be the time to tell my dentist buddy about his wife’s gopher cult.  He was my best friend and the kind-hearted part of me knew that he needed to understand why she was acting so strange but as I looked over to the telephone pole in his neighbor’s yard, I imagined Squeaky’s final muted scream as his throat was torn away by one of nature’s powerful raptors and my own need for revenge on the Giant Gopher Cult leader was far too strong.

My Calgary buddy was a great host but after giving him the cursed Esplendido and hearing about his company’s comptroller cleaning him out I felt that maybe I should move on to the next stop in my “quickly becoming a total disaster” road trip…. REGINA….. The Queen city of the Plains… Home of the Saskatchewan ” Roughriders”…

My dentist buddy was really happy to hear that I was on my way to his town since his household was getting a bit tense between him and his wife after the demise of her pet gopher “Squeaky”.  Seems Squeaky was catching a few rays in the back yard a few weeks ago and was carried off by a hawk that came screaming down from the clouds like a supersonic F-18.  What made matters worse is that my friend’s wife was in the kitchen and saw the whole thing unfold.  She ran into the back yard and heard her little gopher squeaking as it’s captor flew into their neighbor’s yard and sat perched on a telephone pole.   She stood there and stared in horror as the hawk grasped the little gopher in its talons and tore it to shreds leaving tufts of hide and fur to come wafting to the ground for the crows to carry away.

The poor woman then joined a support group that helped give her closure but my buddy said that since that day she had been acting a little weird.

What was I walking into???

When I pulled up to their house my buddy was at work and his wife met me at the door, gave me a hug, and asked me if I would go with her to the church to help her pick up some boxes.  She jumped into my car and we had a few laughs as we drove along but I could sense that something wasn’t quite right with how she kept staring at me.  She seemed to look through me with this blank stare and kept saying that everything in her life is now complete ever since she met a group of new friends that really want to help her become all that she can be.  Huh??  We drove up to the church and she led me down stairs into the church basement.

I noticed a musky smell in the church basement as we walked down a narrow dark hallway to a door that had a white paper sign saying, ” Power of our Galaxy “.  My friends wife reached down to a cardboard box at the foot of the door and pulled out what looked like a pyramid fashioned out of a coat hanger which she put on her head.  She knocked three times and then closed her eyes and started to howl like a tortured coyote.  The door opened and the next thing I noticed was a very foul smell coming out of the dimly candle lit room we were walking into.  Approximately 20 people, all wearing coat-hanger pyramid hats were standing in the room and as soon as we entered they all started howling like coyotes, making it official…. I had walked into a nightmare !

I was led to a chair in the middle of the room and told to have a seat.  Everyone else dragged chairs into a circle surrounding me and it started to become apparent, I was the guest of honor.   After sitting down I was handed a small shoe box and told to keep it closed until, “the moment of my cleansing”…. Huh???  I was also handed my own coat-hanger pyramid hat but when I refused to put it on my head the mood in the room changed for the worse.  Almost on cue half the people were either barking and growling like rabid dogs and the rest started cawing like crows which finally ended when I put the pyramid on my head. After everyone in the room was seated and things settled down I heard a door open and some shuffling as someone dressed in a furry costume with a gigantic gopher head hopped into the circle of chairs and kept hopping up and down as it sprayed me with ketchup from a squeezable bottle.  This lasted for about 30 seconds and I felt paralyzed until the stuff he was spraying on me started burning my skin and eyes.  I jumped up and started tearing at my clothes, ripping them off so I could get this evil bloody burning sensation to come to an end when the barking, growling and cawing began again.

Now I’m totally naked and exposed to a bunch of strangers, and I mean strange, when the giant gopher yelled something about me being dirty which got the crowd chanting, “Dirty Dirty Dirty”.  The giant gopher saw that I had dropped the taped up shoe box and motioned for me to pick it up and sit back down which seemed to relax the rest of the pyramid heads… The chanting stopped….  My friend’s wife stood up, walked over to me and asked me why I had made so many mistakes in my life and why I wanted the animals to suffer.. This seemed funny to me so I broke out in a nervous laughter….,.  more barking, growling and cawing….. I stopped laughing…….

The mood in the room became more relaxed when the giant gopher asked everyone in the room to pick up the boxes under their chairs and put them on their laps.  People started smiling and caressing their boxes, a few people were kissing them when I heard the giant gopher say, “Music…” and Joe Cocker’s ” You Are So Beautiful” started playing from a tinny sounding stereo somewhere in the back of the room.  Everyone except the big gopher, who was still hopping up and down, stood up and danced around with their shoe boxes held over their heads until the song stopped and thats when the gopher asked me if I was clean….. Dead silence in the room………. This time a little louder, “ARE YOU CLEAN ? “….. I whimpered that yes, I WAS clean just so I could shut him up and thats when the door flew open and two smaller gophers ran into the room and soaked me with 2 pails of warm soapy water.  I was given a stack of paper towels and told to dry myself off, which was the best thing that happened to me all day until I was told to get dressed after being handed a shopping bag that contained my own fuzzy gopher costume !  I was cold… The costume looked warm and fuzzy…… I put on the gopher costume…

If I thought that my day had been a bit weird so far, I was really in for a treat when I was told to open my shoe box. I wasn’t about to encourage any of the pyramid people to start barking, growling and cawing so after I sat back down I managed to get the top off the shoe box and almost lost my lunch. Inside my own personal shoe box I saw 3 or 4 ( I couldn’t tell) dead rotting gophers which appeared to have been scraped off a highway with a putty knife.  The giant hopping gopher then asked me if I would pray over my gophers, love my gophers and give him $500 to be a part of the “Movement for the Advancement of Gopher Awareness in our Galaxy”.. I reached down to my red stained clothes on the floor beside me and found my wallet which had a few personal cheques inside and started writing ………. He stopped hopping and said that I’d have to stay at the church overnight until the cheque cleared which was a situation, I don’t mind saying, that just wasn’t working for me.  I asked him if he’d settle for $160 cash and he seemed good with that and removed his giant gopher head and revealed who he was.  No way…… It couldn’t be……….

I stopped dead in my tracks when the Joseph Stalinesque man stood before me.  You know, the guy who was being mean to his kid at the mall….. You know, the guy who left his cigars beside me as he berated his kid………. You know…. THE CIGAR GUY FROM CALGARY !!!!!!  This couldn’t be……. Did he just fly into town?  He smiled, came over and looked me straight in the eye and said that I was family.. I was loved… I now  belong….. I wanted to kill him……..

Someone announced that coffee and cake was being served upstairs in the church and, to be honest, I couldn’t wait to get out of that foul smelling chamber of road kill. I didn’t have much of an appetite but I wasn’t about to start irritating anyone, so cake it was……. I noticed that a few pyramid people were standing outside on the front steps of the church when I got an idea. I walked over to my car in the gopher suit and found the cursed Cohiba Esplendido, I knew that there was one cigar smoker in the congregation of pyramid weirdos and I knew it was HIS turn to take a walk into the darkness.  I lit up a Siglo I and offered the Esplendido to Mr. Joseph Stalin Gopher-head.  I didn’t care that I was the only one on the steps dressed like a gopher, I didn’t care that I was being sugary sweet to one of the biggest jerks I’d ever seen, I only wanted him to experience some catastrophe….. any catastrophe….. I’d kneel down and pray to a shoe box full of rotting gophers if I knew that he’d experience some sort of Catastrophe.. After a few minutes of smoking together he said that it was the best tasting cigar he had ever had the pleasure to smoke and I nodded and smiled and kept my fingers crossed.

He was very grateful that I offered him the Esplendido and started to tell me something about losing a few cigars yesterday when he looked over into the street and remarked on the number of crows that just landed on his car.

After leaving Lethbirdge and my misguided friend who was setting out on a journey to nowhere with his standup comedy career, I drove through the night to Calgary to see my oil and gas workaholic buddy and maybe settle in for some R&R in that little cow-town in the foothills.  I was feeling exhausted by the time I pulled into his driveway and was very grateful that he left the back door open for me, I let myself in, found one of the spare bedrooms on the ground floor of his house and drifted off to sleep until 3:00 PM the next day.  I woke up to find a beautiful sunny day almost over and decided to go pick up some Cuban rum at one of the many liquor stores in his neighborhood in southwest Calgary.

I needed a coffee before my shopping trip and stopped in to one of the many malls in that town to find one.  Aaaaahh, there’s nothing like a double espresso in the morning, well afternoon in this case, and as I sat down to do some people watching I heard a bit of a commotion coming my way.  There was a small family walking towards the bench I was sitting on and the loudest sound echoing down the hall was coming from this crying 4 or 5 year old boy who had just fallen down and was yanked back to his feet by his father who had an irritated demeanor  and an even louder voice as he set his bags down on my bench, shook his son and told him that trouble was in his future when they got to the car.  The fuming man picked up his bags and then directed his frightened family to the nearest exit.

I was speechless and felt disgusted at this man’s behavior towards his young son when I looked over beside me and saw that a bag had been left behind.  When I looked at the writing on the bag and then looked inside I found myself at a moral crossroads because of it’s contents.  The bag was from a cigar store and what I found inside were 3 lovely, longer length cigars with Cohiba bands in a sturdy zip-lock bag and a small box of wooden matches.  There was a receipt in the bag saying that these were Esplendidos and I felt that if I didn’t hurry to return these cigars to their rightful owner I’d be too late.  This was where I took a wrong turn down one of life’s many highways and instead of chasing after this Joseph Stalinesque despot I sat there and re-lived all of the moments in my youth  when authoritative figures had been unfair and heavy handed towards me.

With a few bottles of dark rum and my new found 7 inch freebie cigars I returned back to my friend’s expansive home for a great dinner, some beautiful red wine and stories of some of the more foolish moments of our youth before settling into his smoke-friendly den.  I thought I detected the subtle stench of sulfur enter the room and you could see and feel things rapidly change as soon as the flames from our torches licked the feet of these Cohibas.  We continued to laugh and reminisce, and I have to say, these were very tasty cigars but, in no time, the hair on the back of my neck started to rise and my skin went cold.  The phone rang….

I watched the color drain from my friend’s face as spoke into the phone and blankly stare at me as he kept repeating, ” I’ll kill him…… I’m going to kill him!”  I continued to hear this mantra when my own cel phone vibrated in my shirt pocket, I hit the green button and strained to make sense out of the screaming on the other end of the line saying something about a flying outboard boat motor and lawyers surgically removing my scalp with some rusty garden shears. After a moment or two I recognized that I was talking to my next door neighbor telling me about some runaway dump-truck careening  across my lawn, smashing into  my “uninsured” boat in my driveway and launching my brand new 90 horse outboard engine over our hedge and through the windshield of his Lexus which was now on fire. I tried to explain that I wasn’t hiding upstairs with my curtains closed but out of town and that maybe instead of calling the law firm of Damian, Beelzebub and Lucifer, the fire department should be contacted.  I told him that I’d be home in a few days and that there was no need to exact any revenge, we were bigger than that and could settle this like adults.

My host hung up his phone about the same time I hit the red button on mine and for the next few moments we sat in silence smoking what could be the best Cohibas we’d ever run across.  He then stood up , carefully set his cigar into the ashtray without knocking off the ash, took a sip from his rock glass of rum then hurled it past my head into the shattering mirror on the wall behind the leather chair I was sitting in.  I sat without moving while my friend took another puff all the while being mindful of the ash which was still intact then told me that the comptroller of his company went into the safe, removed about $900,000 in cash and stock certificates then left town. My phone rang again and this time I was speaking to a very angry dump truck driver saying that my lawn was overly wet and slick and that I owed him for a new dump truck.

I hung up my cel phone, turned it off, put it back into it’s leather case, went over to the wet bar and opened a can of cola.  I found a beautiful fresh lime in the small refrigerator under the bar, cut a generous wedge, squeezed it and dropped it into a tall glass then reached for the rum.  This was a rather expensive 15 year old Metusalem Gran Reserva and maybe should be consumed without any mix but this was a special occasion and I was in a special mood, I thought 3 ounces would be just about perfect.  After dropping 3 or 4 ice cubes into the rum I reached for the cola and poured almost half the can into the glass.  I took my cel phone and placed it into the glass of rum, lime and ice then topped up the drink with a bit more cola.

I wondered what would have happened if I would have hurried out the door of the mall to return the forgotten cigars to the tyrant and his family.  Would this evening’s events been a little less memorable?  Perhaps I unknowingly opened the gates of hell and unleashed demons into my Calgarian friend’s den and life would never be the same for the both of us. I sat down with my drink and finished the final third of the best cigar I have ever smoked and will probably ever smoke in my life…. Well I did have 1 left………..

After falling prey to the imaginative pranksters at the motel, I drove at a good pace to Lethbridge and felt that I needed to relax with my friend, the cigar smoking owner of the local Cadillac dealership and maybe meet him for lunch and have a martini or 2 before talking him into booking off early so we could catch up over a game of snooker on his beautiful vintage 12X6 table in his rumpus room.  The last time I was there I gave him a wonderful box set of Dizzy Gillespie CD’s and I, once again, wanted to hear them on his McIntosh stereo.

As I was pulling into town I got him on his cel phone and I could sense that something wasn’t right because of the sound of his voice.  He usually has a loud boisterous tone which tells you, right away, he is the alpha dog at his business, the guy in charge, the guy that runs the show….. but……. something was very wrong.  He had this terrified sound to his voice which told me that I better get over to his office as soon as I could and maybe drag him out of there to some bar where I could ply him with alcohol and find out what was up… I pulled into his car lot and walked into his office only to find him sitting at his desk behind a stack of papers that he was reading, re-reading and making notes.  After a quick hello and ordering a couple of coffees from his secretary I find out that this stack of papers are jokes.  Jokes?? these are jokes that he has written and is now studying to prepare himself for his debut as a comedian at the brand new local comedy club where he’ll performing for the very first time. What?????  This guy is the picture of success, he has everything a guy could want, a great home, great family, bright future and a tax bracket that most of us can only dream about and he’s telling me that he wants to give it all up to go into a life of show business.  Problem though is that …….. The guy isn’t funny!

After sitting through a bit of a rehearsal at his office with a very small audience.. me…. I find out that I had to try my best to look amused as I sat through his routine but I felt that this was going to be a disaster and I had ring-side seats to his Waterloo.  After meeting up with him at his home after work for a quick bite, we drove to the comedy club and I went with him to his dressing room and heard him run through a few more terrible jokes before I left him to go out into the club and try to find a seat… Maybe in the back… Way in the back beside a dimly lit exit.  As it turns out, there aren’t a lot of people in the room and I find out that almost all of the people in the audience are people that work in his car dealership.

The lights go dim, an emcee comes out and introduces my friend and the crowd erupts into a very enthusiastic welcome as he stumbles on to the stage.  His jokes start out, like they did in his office earlier on in the day, with not a bang, not a pop or snap or sizzle….. They sort of just sag and wilt like a salad that has spent the last 6 hours under a heat lamp but my old buddy is feeling very encouraged because all his employees are laughing, howling, cheering and clapping like crazed maniacs who know that their future employment is at stake.  I had to sneak out for a smoke.

I sat on the front steps of the club and lit a Cohiba Setretos Maduro 5 .  This dark little mareva starts out with the Cohiba black pepper, woody taste which becomes a bit muskier as it burns along.  The perfect Cohiba construction allows an easy draw to the end, very reminiscent of the Genios I love, and I believe The bringing them on this little road trip of mine will certainly help me through any trying moment I may experience on this adventure.

I sneak back into the club as my friend was getting a standing ovation and met him backstage in his dressing room.  When I finally saw him I didn’t know what to say so…., I told him that he was great as he pumped my hand furiously and thanked me profusely.  I told him that something had come up….. My canary was dying and I had to rush back home and take care of the funeral arrangements.  He was sad for my loss and told me as much but suggested that I just let go and instead of throwing any good money away, simply flush the thing down the toilet.  I couldn’t stay a minute longer…. I left town and made tracks for my next stop, Calgary!  This trip has GOT to improve!!!!!!

Day 2 and after a not so relaxing night in an affordable roadside motel 10 hours from home I thought I’d continue on and drive the rest of the way to Lethbridge, Alberta.  Problem is, I shouldn’t have waged war on the red-neck party animals who were up all night a few motel room doors down from me at 3:00 AM.  A part of me knew that maybe all I needed to do was to put in some ear-plugs, roll over and go back to sleep when they started a late night football game in the parking lot below my room.  Another part of me knew that it would have been better to stay in my room and keep to myself rather than go down to the group of yahoos and tell them that they were acting like idiots, keeping all kinds of people from sleeping and that if they didn’t shut up immediately they’d regret ever being born.  You’d think I’d have known better after seeing the majority of them walking around holding on to bottles of every kind of hard liquor imaginable mixed with the sounds of country and western music blaring from one of their pick-up trucks idling in the parking lot.

You’d think I’d have had a bit of common sense…………………. You’d think……………….

Nope!!!!!!!

I told them if they touched or harmed my car( Pointing to my Car) in any way, I’d have the lot of them thrown in jail.  I marched back to my room, slammed the door and thought that I had made my point in a crystal clear manner.  Things quietened down after that and I felt victorious but got a bit nervous when I heard voices whispering and quietly laughing now and then just outside my door.  I somehow got back to sleep….

Next morning the parking lot looked like a ghost town and the only vehicle left was my car but it looked very very different from the last time I saw it.  The tires were removed and the vehicle had been jacked up and put on blocks…. Big blocks…… High blocks……. The car was about 7 feet off the ground sitting on, what appeared to be, 2 foot length pieces of railroad ties all stacked up like Leggo blocks.. It almost looked like a crane would have been needed to lift my car that high….. Plus……. My tires and rims were tied to the handles of the car’s doors and hanging by 4 feet of rope.

These were very smart practical jokers I ran into and I have no idea how the police and tow truck people were able to get my car off of the stilts without hurting it but all was in order after I walked 2 blocks back to the motel after breakfast. The police said that they had actually heard of this very same problem 2 days before at one of the neighboring towns.  Seems like there was a group of engineer students terrorizing the country after a “Big and Rich” concert was cancelled in Calgary and some very strange pranks had been pulled.

I gassed up, had 6 hours to go and lit up a Cohiba Magicos on my way out of town.  Something told me that not just any cigar would do so I lit up something very special.  The 5 year aged maduro wrapper had a calming effect on me as I held this cigar during the first third.  I think it was the rich chocolate flavors this cigar has to offer had me pacified and allowed the next hour and a half to smoothly pass by. These are a real victory of cigar blending and rolling and I felt that this little Magicos saved my morning.

Well the most important items to pack for a road trip these days are my cigars and a supply of Butane and, oh yeah, a toothbrush…….  I’ve been wanting to leave town for a few months and since Christmas is gone and all of the commitments that go along with that holiday are taken care of my only concern is me, and my time in the next few days…. Maybe a week…… Probably more time than that……

The best part about not being really sure where to go is that you aren’t held back by any restrictions, other than maybe the weather and road conditions.  The one thing I DO know is that I want to drive EAST and with that in mind I have all of Canada facing me.  If you have never driven from coast to coast in North America in an east-west fashion, you need to know that it could take a while.  I read somewhere that a watched pot DOES boil….. but it takes a while!  This being winter, in most of Canada, I’m wondering if I should have my head examined for what I’m about to do……. Nawww….. It should be fine!!!  Especially since I want to stop along the way and visit a few friends of mine who are cigar smokers, like myself.

I have a real close friend who lives in Lethbridge, Alberta.  I’m not about to start mentioning any names because of…. well…… This guy has a very healthy humidor which he keeps stocked with wonderful ( pricey ) items from the Cohiba brand and he’s been asking (hounding, really) me to drop by for a few days of fun and irrational behavior.  His job wears heavily on him and, although very successful, he needs to blow off a bit of steam from time to time…… This is where I come in!!!!

After Lethbridge I’ll be continuing on to Calgary to visit another friend who is in the oil and gas business.  Wow, talk about a workaholic!!!!  He spends about 4 to 5 months of the year up in Canada’s north, searching for oil and sometimes natural gas and he has a lot of people working under him and depending on him to be very good at what he does….. When he is successful at finding great amounts of natural resources he goes on a tear and disappears for a few weeks…. This is where I come in!

One more person I really want to see is a dentist friend of mine in Regina!!  I don’t think I need to tell you about his line of work and how it weighs on him, all I need you to know is that he’ll go to Cuba once every couple of years and come back with the kind of treasure we all dream of……. Guess what, this is where I come in………

I have made some very good friends along the way and I wouldn’t trade them for all the gold on the planet.. A few of them can be really irritating…… but…… Oh well, so can we all.. I can be a real pain but I usually show up with some very nice cigars and Scotch and leave when I feel that the time is right…….

I’m sure all of you, from time to time, notice the color of the Cohiba Cigar ash and comment to yourselves on how bright white they can be compared to most, if not all, other Cuban brands.  I was going through some old photographs and remembered some of the first Esplendidos I smoked and photographed.  These were moments I found to be memorable and decided to keep a bit of a record on the ash colors that Cohiba had.  There have, of course, been some cigars I forgot to photograph but as time goes by I can remember that each time I light up a Cohiba I never fail to think to myself how clean they burn.

Shape of the ash and how it burns is another factor I look at when enjoying a cigar.  2 days ago I was enjoying a Cohiba Robusto and was amazed at the construction, even burn and color of the ash.  This cigar had an even cone shaped end as it burned, which will tell you that it was rolled by skilled hands.  The ligero tobacco in the middle of the cigar burns slower because of mineral content, sugar and nicotine therefore giving you the cone shaped burn.

The quality of the soil in Cuba which produces this world class tobacco will also dictate the color of a cigar’s ash.  A high potassium content in the soil, for example,  will give you a lighter ash and I also believe that Cohiba’s third fermentation process gives Cohiba cigars their tremendous taste and burn quality.

I, for one, am very excited about the release of 3 new cigars from Cohiba this March/April.  We’ll be seeing a bit of a different blend of leaves as well with the use of the two very top leaves of the tobacco plant that are called ” medio tiempo”.  Some reviews have said that these are a beautiful tasting cigar, very rich in flavors while others say they will probably have a not so beautiful price tag.

There will be no way they’ll be as expensive as the original Behike that was introduced in 2006 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Cohiba. Only 100 humidors were released at a price of about $450 per cigar.  I believe that this year’s release will be more affordable to the general public but still no promises as to how many will be available.

The Behike BHK 52 will be a petit Robusto with a length of 122 and a ring gauge of 52.  The Behike BHK 54 will be a Robusto Extra at a length of 144 at a 54 ring gauge while the Behike BHK 56, a double Robusto, will have a length of 166 and, of course, a ring gauge of 56.

Cohiba, my favorite brand out of Havana and easily the best quality tobacco, not only has me in awe of their efforts but never ceases to amaze me as to how much suspense they can provide to their devotees.