Trying to find Woodstock

Break out the celebratory alcohol, people. There are no tests for 3 weeks. I'm currently studying Judd Apatow's early work, as I'm sure the early adolescence of Dr Sweets will be relevant on one of my exams. Or maybe it's just that the soundtrack on Freaks and Geeks is kick ass, and I'm burnt out from conjugating all those french verbs. My English is really suffering. Gord said something to me today, and I replied "I are?" I'm turning into a lolcat.

It rained all day yesterday, and all we did was laundry. If there's one good thing about having to trek to the laundromat every 2 weeks, it's that you can get every piece of dirty laundry done in 2 hours, using 3 double load washers and 6 dryers. We still always manage to end up with unpaired socks, but at least we've got clean sheets and undies for another 14 days.

We're in the midst of finding jobs, a new apartment and a cat sitter for the 2 weeks that we're going home to Calgary, and frankly it is exhausting. I hate phoning strangers and having to be manically cheerful. Thank god for Gord, because he's been picking up all my stranger phoning slack. While I'm not a lesbian, and I'd rather eat my own eyeballs than get married again, it would be nice to have someone here to do all those crappy jobs. The laundry, the phone calls and the paperwork, maybe some vaccuming...

What Gord and I need is a good little 1950's wife. She'd make us drinks before dinner, and iron our socks, and listen to all our problems. But I guess after 10 years or so, she'd hit the 60's, stop shaving and rant all the time about us being oppressive fascists. She'd be right, and when she packed all her newly tie-dyed shirts into a duffel bag, I'd be right there with her, trying to find Woodstock.

Do over

I'm going to redo the book giveaway, as I haven't heard from Cassandra. It's a really fun book and a great escape from reality, should you be suffering from recession blues, or 'it's rained all week' blues, or 'why the heck am I not making any Etsy sales' blues - the book won't stop the rain, fix the recession or jump start your business, but it will give you a few hours of enjoyment that will make it easier to handle all that crap. It's called "Eating the Cheshire Cat" but there is no eating of cats in the book, in case you're squeamish about that. Here's the publisher's note:

Eating the Cheshire Cat lures us into a world of perfectly planned parties and steep social ladders, where traditional rites of passage take unpredictable and horrifying turns as three girls and their overbearing mothers collide. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, beauty is as beauty does, with axes and knives and killer smiles.

Sarina Summers and her mother will stop at nothing to have it all. Nicole Hicks harbors a fierce obsession with Sarina, which repeatedly undermines Mrs. Hicks''s ambitious goals. Bitty Jack Carlson, a nice girl from the wrong side of the tracks, is caught in the crossfire but struggles to succeed outside the confines of this outrageous yet eerily familiar Southern community. It''s survival of the fittest. Which girl will come out on top?

Covering everything from summer camp to the University of Alabama''s Homecoming game, this fast-paced and unforgettable novel will keep readers guessing until the bitter end.

So, again, leave a comment and a way to contact you, and I will pick a winner on Thursday. And whoever wins gets to give it away again and keep it moving. Need an extra incentive to enter? Tell me what your favorite chocolate bar is and I'll try to include it. Just don't pick Junior Mints, because I couldn't find them anywhere in Montreal when I wanted to make brownies. We used 4 Peps, and they turned out fine, but sometimes you just want a Junior Mint.

Days 7, 8 & 9

It rained last night. And the thunder ROOOOLLLLED, Garth Brooks. It was so long, I had time to think complete sentences. It was so loud, I felt it roll through me. It wasn't scary, just like the sky was going "Look what I can do!" very emphatically.


At some point, Gord gets up and takes everything except the sleeping bag to the car so it won't get wet in our leaky tent. Also, we were idiots and left our shoes outside the tent, cause god knows you don't want dirt in the tent. So we wake up to soggy shoes, but the sun is shining and we don't have to drive ANYWHERE today. What a freaking relief that is.

We didn't take any pictures, or even really do anything. Wait, we did laundry. Glorious clean clothes, no more bean and chili pants. We feel like kings. We also leash the cats and bring them outside for a while. They don't like outside, or being leashed. A train hoots in the distance, and both cats loose their shit. Ruku bolts into the litter box and burrows in the back, Penta dives into the duffel bag and almost knocks it off the picnic table in panic. The cats are put back in the car.

And for dinner, replay the fire woes from the previous post, minus the eventual fire. Tonight we try toilet paper and a hockey magazine. No go. It's especially embarrassing because there are witnesses in the camp to our right. These people have a camper, a tarp village, a bbq, CHRISTMAS LIGHTS...these people are equipped. These are the people that watch the Canadian Tire commercials for the outdoor air conditioning units, portable showers, and solar powered big screen tv and entertainment units and think, well, now it's possible to survive in the wilderness. I shouldn't mock them though, because the nice man had some lamp oil that he offered to pour on our logs. We had another brief fire, cooked some smokies and went to bed.

Only a light rain that night.

We wake up, and go directly back to sleep. Seriously. It starts to rain, and there wasn't anything else to do.

Second wake up, and we go to the store to get food, because I think we've pissed off the fire gods.
I'm hoping they have bread, and sandwich meat and cheese. They don't. We get:

2 cans of Pringles chips
2 chocolate bars
1 box of Gobstoppers
1 deck of cards
1 Coke
1 Fresca

We eat the Pringles and play cards in the tent for a while and it starts to rain. Again. Only HARD this time, and it's dripping into the tent.

Gord's shoes, that were almost dry, are filling up with rain outside the tent. We send whiny text messages to our friends and wait for the rain to end.

When it does, we reconfigure the tarps so that our tent is completely covered. Screw the picnic table and firepit, they're no use anyway. We sit in the tent in a gentle rain. We have one can of vegetarian chili and Gord snuggles with it for 2 hours to get it to body temperature. We eat in the tent and go to sleep. The new tarp deployment is a success. We hear the patter of rain all night, but nary a drop enters the tent.

I'd like to take a moment and thank Gord for being stuck in a tent with me for almost an entire day, and not only NOT fighting, but making it fun. There are very few people who could sit in a tiny 2 man tent with me for that long and not think standing in the rain is preferable.

Tomorrow...after a year of planning and 6 days of driving, 2 days camping in a leaky tent with fire woes, we will finally get to Montreal.

OR WILL WE?
(CUE OMINOUS MUSIC)

PS. The chili was still in the can. Gord did not smear chili all over his body to warm it up, and we didn't eat lukewarm chili off his naked torso with plastic forks. Just in case you didn't have that picture in your head already ;)

Day 6

We had originally planned to drive fast enough to give ourselves a day off and still make it to Montreal for June 30th, but since we don't have a show to go to, we now have 2 full days free. We can't get our apartment in Montreal until the first, so we check online for campgrounds near Ottawa, and find the Ottawa Municipal Campground. Gord calls and charms the pants off the girl on the phone, and gets us a site for 3 nights. We leave the motel in a light drizzle that becomes a downpour. Just as we're heading into North Bay, we spot - HALLELUJAH, A Canadian Tire. Not that there isn't one every 50 feet along the Transcanada, but we've just realized that we need to recover and retie the mattress. We have a mild tiff in the parking lot, and I make Gord stay in the car while I head into Canadian Tire to get new tarps, matches, duct tape and more bungee cords. How did people manage before bungee cords? I also picked up a new non leaky mattress, because I'm too delicate to sleep on the actual ground.

We fix the mattress, tie it down tight and head to the Sobeys across the parking lot. This time, I stay in the car while Gord gets groceries for the next few days. It's day 6 of constant togetherness, and it's about time for a break, even if it is only 15 minutes each. He comes back with more smokies (this is why I love him), more cans of chili, and bananas...Actual fruit. Not just something that claims to be 'fruit flavoured'.

We don't take a lot of photos today until Gord sees this building:


Which is where the Ottawa Senators play.

We get to the campground, find our site, and set up the tent. Gord goes for firewood while I blow up the air mattress. Here's where our natural camping ineptitude strikes again. The wood is all stored in these chicken wire pens, in plasstic bags. It's been raining all day. The wood is damp.
Also, while I picked up enough duct tape and bungee cords to be the next Red Green, I forgot all about those handy little things called hatchets. This wasn't such a big deal in Wawa, where each bag of firewood had tiny little kindling pieces, but here at the Ottawa Municipal Campground, you get giant logs. So we sat at our damp picnic table and peeled little strips of wood off the rough hewn logs. Soon we had a little pile of damp strips of wood and very sore fingers. Surely we could make fire with this! Having learned my lesson in Wawa, and also having decided that there's no way anything was going to burn, I graciously let Gord build the fire.

So here's how it went down:
G:"Yeah, these sticks aren't going to light."
L: "Hmpf"

Silence

G: "I would really appreciate some help."
Ok, now we're talking (or, we're talking now that he realizes HE NEEDS MY HELP. I win)
"Throw some more matches in."
"Are you sure?"
"We've got 500 of them. Throw a handful in. That'll work."
"Okay."
We have a brief display of match heads flaring and going out in the damp damp firepit.
"Now what?"
"We have toilet paper in the car..."
"How much?"
"4 or 5 rolls..."
"OK!"

I get a roll of toilet paper, and bring it back. We proceed to take a couple squares, crumple them and tuck them under the wet sticks, light them...add more toilet paper, watch it burn, add more...thinking that if nothing else, this should dry out the sticks and then they too will burn.

And we're right, but it takes 2 rolls of toilet paper to do this. Don't anyone tell my dad that I wasted 2 rolls of toilet paper like that. Well, not wasted. While Gord was crumpling and burning, I cooked 2 smokies over our toilet paper fire.
We do finally have a fire going - ok, one of the drier logs is on fire, and the rest are just there for show. Gord shoves a can of chili in as close to the burning log as he can without burning his hands. I did come prepared - I came with a guy who will stick his hands in fire so I can drop hot chili on my pants. That's Love, that is. We eat the chili and I'm about to say "Lets put out the fire and go to bed" when the fire goes out. We go to bed.



Gas to get us this far:
Calgary $33.00 @ 131.9
Medicine Hat $39.00 @ 130.9
Swift Current $40.00 (I'm guessing, we lost the receipt)
Regina $37.00 @ 139.9
Moosomin $34.00 @ 139.9
Winnipeg $40.00 (again, no receipt)
Kenora $42.50 @ 137.9
Ignace $39.00 @ 143.9
Thunder Bay $52.00 @ 143.9
Marathon $44.00 @ 145.0
Wawa $47.49 @ 141.9
Sault Ste Marie $37.00 @ 136.9
Wahnapitae $50.68 (doesn't say, can't remember how much/litre)
Stonecliffe $48.00 @ 136.9