But I nearly didn’t, for I was away with the fairies last night again.
Well, not exactly the fairies, but a bunch of young girls, taking them to an audition as dancers in a film. However we arrived on the wrong day – the day when they were to audition the main cast – and one of the young girls said that she would like to try out for n acting role. Much to my (and everyone else’s) surprise, she had the most wonderful singing voice out, and ended up with the starring role.
Yes, who says my bed is uncomfortable and my camp site is noisy? I was out by about 22:00 and didn’t feel a thing. Totally painless.
But yesterday, just messing about, the Lady Who Lives In The Sat-Nav told me that Montreal was just 1:15 away from here on the motorway and so I decided to go. By 07:30 I was on the road and by 09:00 I was at my storage unit, and that includes having a 15-minute chat at the Canadian border with the Immigration Officer. He was a little peevish and sour at first but soon warmed up when he found out that I came from “somewhere near Liverpool” as that is where his father comes from and he knew the area pretty well. And so we had an interesting chat.
The drive to Montreal was uneventful and I’d sorted out my locker and loaded up Strider by 11:45.and after an exciting moment when I was ruthlessly and deliberately cut up by a bad-tempered Quebecois, I headed for home.
That was more interesting than you might think, because roadworks had closed off the interchange between the two motorways that I needed to take and I forgot which motorway I was on – hence having to go around the lengthy diversion twice before I could find my way out.
Having seen the enormous queue to get into the USA this morning, I turned off the Motorway and came around the back way to the tiny (and as yet un-modernised) crossing just up the road from here. But the queue here was enormous too, with just two officers on duty and seemingly having a work-to-rule.
But they asked me all kinds of questions to which (for once) I knew the answer, and the woman fell in love with Strawberry Moose, although she refused to have her photo taken with him.
But there was a depressing incident here. A foreign tourist in a hire-car had to go into the office to pay her $6:00 entry fee and went in through the wrong door. This was right behind the Immigration woman and she turned round startled when she heard the door opened.
“It’s a good job for her that I didn’t go for my gun” she said to me, and so I had quite a few words with her. As I’ve said before, “going for your gun” when you hear a door open is the limit of just how frightened and paranoid the average American is these days. It would be totally pathetic if it wasn’t so sad – Government employees blasting away tourists just because they go in through the wrong door.
It’s a mentality like this, bred into the various law enforcement officers, that has led to the current wave of violence on the streets of the USA as the law enforcement officers gun down anyone and everyone who scares them, no matter what they might be doing.
It’s a time-bomb that everyone is sitting on here, and it’s waiting to explode.
On that note, I came here. It was 15:00 and I started to sort out my stuff. And at least I now have a proper bed to sleep on, even if it is too big for the tent.
