Going Far Away To Do Wild and Crazy Things

Airborne at 29000 feet, just approaching Churchill near Hudson Bay, which from the looks of things from the plane is essentially a gigantic mudflat or elluvial plain that ends in a bay the size of the Gulf of Mexico. The flightpath will take us over Greenland, where we will turn right, then over Scotland and down to Holland. Total flight time is 9 hours.

It looks like the only thing I forgot was my power adapter, which costs $75 in the US and will probably cost about 857 Geldings or whatever in Holland. Otherwise I seem to have remembered everything, which is a damned miracle considering that I’ve been sick enough to barely function. Later last night and this morning it was getting hard to drive or walk because I was too dizzy, and I still want to sleep all the time.

Hudson bay looks like a gigantic mangey mixed drink. More like what happens when cream gets just shy of cheese and then is dumped into coffee. Welcome to Canada. Go home.

I’m on a DC-10 (‘10’ indicating the number of times the plane has dropped engines on people) which appears to have two bathrooms per 75 people. There is a child in the business class that is being vocally exhuberant and has been for about 1,200 miles. With the ear infection I am sure I am not alone in wondering if we can drop the child off in Churchill, preferably from slightly higher than we are now.

As expected, it didn’t start really sinking in that I’m going Far Away to do Wild and Crazy Things until I was in the air. Holy Shit, kids. In less than 6 hours I’ll be in Amsterdam, by myself, with a backpack that I’ve accidentally loaded full of nuetronium and a bicycle that has suicide doors. Bill, my partner in crime, is going to be delayed in joining me. It turns out that Bill is from Canada. The Canadian passport office is in Quebec. In case you haven’t heard much about (or of) Canada, Quebec has a relationship with the rest of the country (Canada) that is very similar to the relationship Texas has with the USA. The main difference is that while neither Texas nor Quebec spreak English, Quebec instead speaks French.

The Canadian passport office apparently decided that since Bill is not from Quebec he should not be allowed to leave the US for fear that he might return to Canada, and so sent his passport to Texas. So Bill will have to wait until he can convince the Quebeqois that he does not intend to return to Canada any time soon before he can join me in Europe, by which time I’ll be safely hidden.

So I will soon be wandering aimlessly through Amsterdam on my own, free to tour the city, fall off my bicycle and get mugged. Seriously, it’s a -really- wierd feeling. How many times in your life have you truely gone some place totally alien (like Texas) without Something To Do? Like business or work?