uh huh, uh huh. . . . shit - D22

So my work holiday visa to NZ went through today. WTF!  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't surprised that for five minutes of this it wasn't an uphill battle. . .  You don't even want to know what I've been going through with airlines to try to make this thing work.  So what I'm sort of interested in doing right now is this.  Fly to NZ, work there for 6 months, fly to Vietnam, work there 3-5 

months, fly to Europe, tour around approx. 1 month, fly home, call it a day.  American airlines has $1300 CAD (roughly $10 USD)  of my money that I need to spend with them or they flush it down their lunch room toilet in april 2009.  Here's the deal: NZ doesn't care if I land there as long as I have a ticket out.  So I'd buy an onward to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.  Vietnam doesn't care if you fly in as long as you have a visa (unless you're a Swedish citizen which I am) and a flight out.  I'd book the flight out before I got there, while in NZ.  Europe doesn't care what I do there, cause I'm an EU citizen.   HOWEVER.  American airlines, noble upholders of international law that they are, have kindly informed me that they won't let me on a plane in Toronto unless I have all my visas lined up to come all the way back home.  ahahha, yeah. . .[akward silence] trouble with that is I am on a WORKING HOLIDAY assholes.  I can't afford to drop 5 k on a fucking plane ticket right now AND I don't know if this is exactly what I want to do yet, so a little flexibility would be not unheard of in this situation.  Unless you're AA (Amercian Airlines, Alcoholics Anonymous, take your pic).  If you're AA then you're inflexible and you make your customers lie to you in order to pocket the change and play it off like a service to Interpol and the whole international community.  See by doing this they force customers like me to buy roundtrip tickets and then cancel their flights when they get where they're going.  If they were unfortunate enough to get an inflexible ticket then AA pockets the difference.  If they weren't then AA pockets a change fee.  I asked them if I could fly home from somewhere else if I decide to go to Europe and they said "Sure, no problem!".  So riddle me this:  If AA is responsible, as they claim, for flying me home at any point in my journey if I fuck up, even out of Hanoi (from where they don't fly) and that this will, as they claim, cost them $10,000 USD, then why wouldn't they a) give me an earful about wanting to fly out of somewhere else that I don't have a visa for when I leave here, or b) give me an earful when I say "poof, I'm in england now, can I just fly home from here, it's closer".  Why wouldn't they yell at me and say  "son you scared the shit out of us back there, we thought you were in Auckland now you pop up on the grid with an EU passport in London, you better fly home before your father hears about this."  Why don't they say that?  Well apart from the fact that they lack the creativity to come up with even the blandest scoldings, they wouldn't say that because then they couldn't pocket a change fee plus some extra money for flying me home, OR (and this is really rich) pocket the difference between the flight home from Heathrow and the flight home from Auckland, keep it as a voucher and say "we're looking forward to flying with you again. . . before October 2010 when we will flush your 25c US down the lunch room toilet and laugh because the last thing we saw was your wretched Queen's face."  That's why.  Because before international or even 'Homeland' security comes the almighty dollar.

Been awhile since I had a good rant, enjoy the recession, I know I will.

D22

What no one ever tells you about train tracks, The famous set on the moisie that takes you all 

god damned day, is that it’s really a never ending CIII punctuated by CIV’s and other assorted goodies like helicopters flying just over your head and the QNS&LR barrelling along beside you,  honking because the engineers never see humans.  The madness consisted of careful sneaks, 

mostly river left, to avoid standing waves the size of small cars.  The day wore on and we were still in train tracks 9 hours after starting.  It was pretty stressful lining and running carefully to avoid high consequence dumps.  We wanted to make it to the gulf tonight, but no such luck.  The sun went down on us, and so we had to pull up a sand cliff using a brigade as it was too steep to climb.  Boats came up with us as the tidal action was obvious in this spot.  We are near the ocean.  While we pulled up we heard a motor and a pickup zoomed by just at the edge of the cliff, 

and as the dust settled on us in the dimming light we looked at each other apprehensively.  Drunk assholes.  The dunes we pulled up onto stretched for kilometres in either direction and were crisscrossed with vehicle tracks and dotted with a few campfires.  We camped 200m away from a tarped mound of something.  As we were portaging a guy so drunk he was barely intelligible (in French) pulled up.  Monosyllables drove him away.  We set up our site in darkness, and as we cooked our dinner, the three pickups that had screamed past in thundering dust clouds parked by the tarped pile of something and lit it.  It was a scrap pile doused in diesel for a scheduled bonfire that night.  Oops.  Boy did we pick the right place.  Drunk ass Quebecers and French country peppered with rousing tunes by 3 Doors Down put us to sleep.  We think about the two guys who pulled up on ATV’s and just stared at us 

while we were getting ready to eat.  We eyed each other silently by fire light and the moment was tense as I said “Hello”.  That got no reply.  Eventually they grunted drunkenly and buzzed off into the dunes.  Tomorrow we awake before the sun and boot it to the ocean.  PS, we saw lampreys today, and they looked like aliens.