Lovers of pizza, pepsi and churches.  They’ve got me on 2 out of 3.

Thanks to the miracle of wi-fi, we’re sitting and writing in a Pizza Hut in Montreal.  It’s handily located across from a big, beautiful church and Urgel Bourgie’s funeral home.  We’re waiting for some greasy, delicious fuel (as we have another 8 hours of driving yet today).  We had planned to be in Edmundston, NB before midnight but life rarely makes accommodations for rock and roll indie bands.  In fact it usually seems to go out of its way to make life “interesting” for outfits like ours.  

The problem today was that the 401 was closed just past Kingston.  Seriously.  The Trans-Canada highway was closed because a large truck (full of pulp), hit a car, hit a bridge, sliced in half, caught fire and slid to a halt blocking all three lanes.  As a precaution (probably a good one since a truck that’s on fire and full of paper would provide some combustability) the RCMP shut down the 401 and we spent an hour with some fellow Canadians wondering what in the name of the baby Jesus was going on.

  

We may have dwelled on this before, but here’s the problem with touring Canada; it’s too christing big.  If you cut through the USA (odd that one has to leave our country in order to cross it faster) you can shave some time off your trip and go from Victoria, BC to St. John’s, NF in only 3 days and 7 hours (yes, 79 hours.)  It’s roughly 7471 km.  There’s many ways to say this, but that’s too far.  It’s just over 8170 football fields.  8-1-7-0!!! Brett Favre’s got a good arm, but I’m not sure he could make the hail mary on that field.  Now we’re only going from Toronto, ON to Halifax NS (a measly 1782 km).  That’s only 1948 football fields but it still feels like a lot.  Anyone want to do wind sprints on that surface?  I’ll pass.

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Writing from the hotel in Edmundston now.  As is our usual style, we’re two hours late and checking in during the wee hours of the morning.  Typically we storm into a room, turn on all the lights, plug in all manner of computers, phones, climate analysis equipment and begin to wind down.  This consists of watching dumb videos (ie Christopher Walken reading the lyrics to “Pokerface”, reading, checking emails and writing some blogs.)  Tonight we have successfully managed to use every outlet in a rather nice hotel room (we will be issuing a formal apology to David Suzuki in a later post).  Everyone is resting peacefully as I write this.  Let’s call it the calm before the storm.  Tomorrow night, Halifax!