Ohhhh you need weelchair access. . .here's an SI form. . .Go join the far queue. Day 2

Two for two since I got back. . . not bad.  Anyway so today I drove to the U and wheezed off the computer hub there.  I was uncomfortable because I was sitting at one of two or three wheelchair access terminals and there were one or two wheelchairs buzzing around my peripheral vision as I tried to concentrate on travel plans. . . I don't think I ruined anyone's afternoon though.  Pretty sure if they wanted to use the computers they were discouraged not by me, but by the 45 minute lineup right behind me.  The queue as it were.  Or the "far queue".  A nice little British pun I read not five minutes ago.  I imagine the far queue is what you tell asshole customers to join when you work sales and you're having a bad day.  You never have to go far to find commonalities in language and culture though.  This summer if a staff member was dense enough to ask about the trip schedule before it was done, they would be referred to Alex Gill, friend and tripping head, for an SI form.  What is an SI form you ask?  Well that's what the staff wanted to know too, so preparing for a long wade through miles of beaurocratic red tape they would ask Alex for an SI form, sometimes having taken over a day to track him down and then having to radio him first, only to be told "Suck It!"  by Alex, grinning from ear to ear.   Spite is the spice of life.  Anyway, I did my best and I managed to get a few leads on places I might like, but it's too early to give anything away, though I welcome suggestions/testimonials/anecdotes on jobs or volunteer positions on this little space rock we live on.

D2

                We drive thousands of km`s today.  We cross three lines of latitude and watch tree species change and disappear.  We buy a guitar in a pawn shop in Baie Comeau.  We see one of North America`s biggest dams: Manic 5.  Lac Manicouagan is a lake visible on any atlas or map of north America or even the world.  It`s  visible because it`s huge.  How big you ask? . . really big.  It was caused by a freaking asteroid.  It`s a giant ring with massive river flowing out of it.  The river has five dams, and Manic 5 is the biggest.  It`s the one right below the lake turned reservoir.  Manic 5 is so big 

that when you drive by it it looks like a city skyline in the sense that it doesn`t move like the trees in front of it.  It`s like the moon.  This morning we cross the Saguenay and see the fjords I would have paddled through if I had kept paddling after the Ashuapmushuan the year before.   The sun sets and at 1:00 there is still light on the horizon because it is 

less than 3 short hours away from rising again.  We look for a place to stop at 9:30.  At 1!:20 we think we’ve found it as after 10 minutes of trying, the GPS gets reception through the bouncing bus windshield.  Gagnon is approaching.  We lose reception but around the time we expect Gagnon the gravel highway becomes suddenly paved and split by a median.  A sidewalk emerges and is divided by curbs and driveways at intervals that lead into the cover of bushes.  They exist for their own sake and are crowded by plants.  The sidewalk ends as suddenly as it began and we are in oblivion going 80 km/hr again. The remnants of a boom town that never quite boomed.  

The northern lights and the railroad are our only companions, as we finally stop in the town of Fermont, the strangest  end of the line we could imagine.  A bleak landscape centered around 1.2 km of V shaped building designed to block the bitter winter wind and contain everything the residents of this remote mine town need.  We pull in and drive around in circles, dead tired until the cops find us and guide us to a gravel pit with a giant mining truck behind it for decoration.    They kindly offer us to sleep there.  We gratefully accept. Nice people in these parts.