new brunswick chronicles - October 19 - 23, 2007

Friday, October 19, 20076:25 pmWell, here I am on VIA train 14 waiting to pull out of the station. I don’t have wireless access because a) I didn’t buy it and b) I have no idea if it would even work. J So I have no idea what is going on here on Train 14, car 21, room 9. I know that I am slightly glad that Shawn isn’t with me because there is no way he would FIT in the hallway/doorway/bathroom OR this room it is SO tiny! I am very happy that I decided to check my suitcase because it would have taken up most of the room.Looks like we’re about ready to pull out. Wheeee!I don’t know how the seat pulls out into a bed, so I hope someone comes by to explain that. I am having a meal at 8:15 but I am thinking maybe I should have chosen the one at 6:45 because I am starving. I have this tiny little plastic thing that I think is a key card for my room. Not really sure about that either. I don’t even know where the dining car is. Hmm. Hope someone comes by to tell me that little bit of information, too.It’s now 6:32 and we haven’t started moving yet. We’re supposed to leave at 6:30. Bastards.I wonder if there are vending machines somewhere on this train? I’m hungry. Think I mentioned that already though.You know, for $350 bucks round trip, this really isn’t such a bad way to travel. I much prefer this to having to sit next to some stranger for the entire trip and have to share the bathroom with other people. I get my own little bathroom in here – of course if I hadn’t just lost 15 or so pounds I don’t think I would fit it in. Yeech. Good thing I had that reduction surgery last summer, I take up much less room now.Oh! We’re moving! And my door seems to be closing on its own. Hee! I’ll stop for now in case I get motion sick.7:13 pmGosh, I’m starving. I was just on the phone with my mother and the train was going by all these restaurants on the side of the tracks. Foooood!! 8:15 just isn’t going to get here fast enough!I also wish I had internet access. I could be missing emails! I could be Live! blogging this trip. And why the heck doesn’t my iBook have a backspace? Gah!So, I phoned Shawn once I had phone reception and told him he wouldn’t fit in this sleeper car. Then I phoned my grandmother and told her and my grandfather to look out their apartment window and wave since I was going by. Then I phoned my mother. I think I am good with the phone calls now. One more phone call to Shawn when I am ready to go to sleep (which would be now, but I still need to eat dinner. Ha!)Oh! They are apparently showing Night at the Museum right now, in, um, some car somewhere. Probably near the canteen place I guess. I saw that already though. What I’d like to see is CSI that I missed last night. Heh.Speaking of TV that I have missed – I am going to miss next week’s America’s Next Top Model! The horror! To be honest I don’t actually think I care.Today was a particularly rough day at work. I totally meant to post about my leaving tonight, but never had time. And I think something very bad is about to happen at work and I am scared about what I might come back to. I will have to make sure that I check in via email to see if the fire was put out or if it’s a raging inferno now. I don’t even want to think about that.Hungry!I think I might have one of those Pablum packs I brought in case I couldn’t eat anything. J8:58pmWell, dinner has been had and now I am back in my little room thingy. Dinner was seafood chowder (yum!), salmon with steamed green beans and pilaf rice. I hate pilaf rice (pretty much all rice for that matter) and the beans weren’t all that great, and my father (and I) make much better salmon on the barbque, but hey, it was edible for me. I seem to have had a lot of salmon in the last week and I seem to be able to stomach fish from what I have figured out. I ate tiny portions (well, I ate all the chowder, but it was like a shot glass of chowder!) and had one and a half glasses of iced tea and then this chocolate monstrosity they called Sweet Sensation (I managed about 4 bites before thinking I was going to go into a diabetic coma! Wow, was that chocolaty and rich!).Once back in my room I pulled down the bed – if you want to call it a bed. Good lord. Shawn wouldn’t fit on this either! I hardly do and it’s hard as a rock. I think I might have been better off just sleeping on the seats set up like a little bench/couch thing. It’s all small, but I have to say I am enjoying every second of this trip. I loved the dining car and I wish I had more guts to have taken more photos. As it was I tried to take some without the flash so no one would notice, but they didn’t really turn out. I was too chicken to take a photo of the cake. Heh.I have iTunes going as I type this but I can’t seem to find a song I want to listen to. (You would totally think that iTunes would totally be IN the spell check on a Mac, wouldn’t you? But no. It’s still being underlined as a misspelled word. Good grief.) And, dude! They totally have plugs in this room so I can plug the iBook in and it won’t die on me if I keep it on to type (if I get up in the wee hours of the morning) or want to keep my music going.Might want to turn on the lights now to try and find the wires in my backpack.Also, I think I’ll phone Shawn now since I feel like I am about to fall asleep as I am typing this.Saturday, October 20, 20076:20 am AtlanticWell, we stopped somewhere at about 6:00 am and once here they turned all the power off. Not that I had my lights on (actually it’s better like this because all the little green emergency lights they have to show you where things are in the room are off making it much darker in the room and better for sleeping – which I haven’t done much of) but with the power shut down the air ventilation shut off. Now it’s sort of stuffy in here and incredibly way too quiet. Let’s add to that the fact that about ten after six my stomach started gurgling. The toilets are all off, I guess with the power shut down. So I am trying very hard not to have to run to the bathroom and be ill since I know from when I just got up to pee that I can’t flush. Sigh.I am wondering if we’ll leave here at 6:30, I think this is the first stop in New Brunswick – Campbellton, maybe? There’s about 3 hours before I get to my stop. At 7:00 they open the dining car and serve breakfast and coffee and stuff. Don’t know if I’ll go though. I think I ate enough last night for diner.We’re moving! They just turned the air back on and I think the lights. Yay!Sleeping on this “bed” isn’t the easiest thing to do. It’s hard and the bouncing from the train makes you feel like you’re being bounced on the pavement like a basketball. I haven’t sleep much at all tonight. If it’s like this on the way home next Sunday, I highly doubt I’ll be going into work. Blech.Oh! A sign out my window just read “Matapedia” (?), I guess that is where we are? Who knows!8:35am AtlanticJust had breakfast (weird stuffed crepe thing), I have put my bed away (smooshed my thumb in the process – ow!) and am still fighting the grumbling of my insides. We’re just about to stop in Bathurst. Looks like I’m the next stop. Apparently they get there about 9:45am .My stupid door keeps swinging closed. I want it open, darnitall! I now have my bag with Finnegan guarding it. Heh. Where we’re stopping is full of tiny run down houses and trailers (oooh! Trailer park!) but they are almost all white and I find it really pretty and out my window, just a little beyond the white houses is water (the ocean? A lake? I have no idea).I love New Brunswick and the country, I wish I could live out here and not have to worry about having to go to work. I’m not thinking of relocating now since Shawn just got this new awesome job, which he starts, on the 29th.And yes, if I have another night on the train on the way home like I did tonight I doubt I am going to go to work. Ugh. I finally managed to fall asleep after I wrote the last part. But it was a fitful sleep and I was still up at 7:45 and then just got up and went to breakfast.There is this old Chinese couple in one of the rooms down the hall from me in this car and all they are doing right now are yelling at each other either through their door or down the hall. Shut up people! There are other people on this train. I hate rude people. The man keeps looking in here when he goes by. Humph. I am none of your business loud old man.I guess we leave here about 9:00? And it takes about 45 mins to get to Miramichi which is where I’ll be met by my cousin Sandra. I should be seeing Sheryl tonight. We’re either staying in Miramichi over night or leaving for Fredericton tonight. I guess we’re playing it by ear.Well, jeepers! I just noticed that this lovely little Word program keeps track of my word count. Hee! With this sentence I am now at 1774 words.I wish it would stop raining.I wonder where I go to get off the train? I hope the nice VIA-flight-attendant Lady comes to tell me when it’s my turn. Of course the couple in the room next to me (room 10, which I believe I am in on the way home, which sucks because I don’t LIKE even numbers. Sigh.) are getting off at Miramichi as well. I’ll just follow them. ;)I forgot to mention, that when I pulled the bed down last night they had it set up for one’s head to be at the end near the door and I slept the opposite way with my pillow up against the window. I am such a backward-folk. J I am really OCD about which way I face, but not intentionally, I just KNOW when I am somewhere which way I need my head to be. I don’t know if it’s always facing in a certain compass point or not (North? West?) but I just know that if I don’t think I am in the right position I will NOT sleep and most likely have a panic attack or something. I am weird. I know it and I flaunt it proudly!What I wouldn’t give for some toothpaste right now. I packed it in the checked luggage accidentally. Blech. And they don’t sell any in the canteen thing, but the really nice lady behind the counter offered to lend me hers. Hee! I’ll just chew on some gum and make sure to brush my teeth as soon as I get my suitcase to where it’s going. J9:07am AtlanticThere are few things more wonderful than looking out your window and seeing two deer grazing in some farmer’s field and then moments later seeing a huge heron fly by. I love the woods and nature.Not spiders though. They ruin nature. As do sharks. And squirrels, but those are ok if I am in the train and I see them through a window. The other two? Not so much. They ruin nature.Sunday, October 21, 20079:54pm AtlanticWell, this is really my first moment to myself since I arrived yesterday morning at 9:50 am. I am now at my cousin Sheryl’s house in Fredericton. It’s like this huge awesome mansion of a house. Very cool. No wireless internet though. But I will be able to check my email tomorrow while everyone is out of the house at either work or school. I love my family, but I can only seem to be able to handle so much of children before I want to hide in a closet or something. Children are exhausting and I have no idea how people do this or have the patience to be on all the time. I feel bad for my parents when I was a kid now. Yikes.So yesterday, when Sandra met me at the train station and we went back to her lovely home and met her lovely dog Maggie, I dropped off my stuff and we went to some place called French Fort Cove. I think I died and went to heaven there. It’s these trails near water, through forest and it was just so peaceful and wonderful smelling, I think I totally forgot how sick I have been. Sandra and I went with Maggie and walked for about a half hour or more (maybe more?) I was just so happy there. I need to live near country and wilderness. I need to. Since I have been here I have felt so healthy, though exhausted, and have only really had one small episode of my stomach bothering me (I have been very careful since I have been here, but at the same time, I have eaten more solid food in the last 24 hours than I think I have in a month!)Sheryl came up to Sandra’s about 4:30 in the afternoon with her kids and we all ate and played cards (Sandra and Sheryl and I did, that is), then Sheryl, her daughter and I slept on the floor in the basement and had a camp out thing. I left with Sheryl and her kids a little before noon to start the 2 hour trip to Fredericton where I dropped my stuff in my room here and was going to take a shower, but promptly fell asleep. I had to wake myself up because we were due at Sheryl’s parents’ place for dinner and they are about 45 minutes away in Harvey Station (where I went when I was 14 and fell in love with their farm house, stable and horses). I had a great dinner with Patty and Peter and got to cuddle their dog (no photo though :() and their 4 cats. Then I got to help Peter bring in the horses and feed them their dinner (after walking through the mud earlier so he could take my photo with one of those weird cameras that has something called “film” in it. I think it’s a new invention. I don’t think it’ll take off.)I am now back at Sheryl’s and in my room ready to go to sleep. I have popped my two benedryl pills to stop the itching from her two cats (Monty Burns and Chief Wiggum) and the 4 cats at her parents’ place, and the horses and the hay. It’s going to be some week. :)I have taken 81 photos so far and the week has only just begun. :)*** Unfortunatly, I didn't write anymore after this and on the 24th I flew home early because I was so sick. Sigh. ***Photos can be seen here.