Canada

If we thought that Wyoming was a big vast nothingness, then that said nothing for Canada. The Rockies off to the west and nothing of anything anywhere else. We grabbed some money in a small border town and drove onto Calgary. The girls we were supposed to stay with fell through, but this time it wa our fault. Our phones did not work at all. Driving through town just after a Calgary Flames game we experience our first traffic jam since Atlanta and the third of the trip. Felt like home and boy would it. Realising that Canada was much more expensive than the US and more like home we tried to find cheap accomodation and failed. We got a motel, headed to Chillies for dinner (where we got chatting with the waitress who was from a small town in the west about many things until she got busted for chatting with us) and headed back for the first Presidential debate. McCain probably just about shaded it, but Obama hung well with the old timer.

In the morning we decided to hang around and walk into town to see what Calgary was like. We saw the tower and the mall. All very nice, but it looked just like any big north-eastern US city. Good place to work, not so amazing to visit. We left Calgary around lunchtime and began a mental sprint across the country to Vancouver. The Rockied leered immensely in front of us as we approached them over the plains. We headed into Banff and were informed by the cute Canuck ranger that we had best drive through to make Vancouver by night fall. Banff National Park was beautiful what we saw of it and everyone had started speeding again, more like the UK than the US. We were concerned that the pass may be closed due to the snow and because the Candians build around things there were only 3 passes. If one was closed they were all likely to be closed. We passed a place called Enchanted Forest that looked like a theme park and we were in suich a rush we could not even stop to play some mini golf. We were looking decidedly up against it time wise to make the hostel for 11pm when they closed the doors to guests. Only later did we realise we would gain an hour for time zones ala Round the World in 80 Days (sadly we realised it too early to be truly cool like the book and play it for tension). Feeling we were making good time and because we were dying of hunger, we stopped in Kamloops for dinner having seen the Canadian A+W Burger joint. Some guy stopped us out of the car and asked us for directions. Now we had just arrived. Of course we did not know where something was. Only he asked us where the A+W was. The only bloody question we could have answered. Ah the joys of fate. We headed to a pub for food. It was full of chav scum and divided into random groups. This was the first authentically British pub we had been in and it sent chills through me. Here and Vancouver would make Ollie nostalgic for home with its similarities, it would drive through to me what I hate about home and not make me miss it. It would however make both os us homesick for the American middle and the effortless friendliness the local extended to us there, compared to the British/Canuck coldness we now felt. As we left we tried to get petrol, but were not allowed to unless someone filled it for us. Very weird and kind of backwards.

Descending on Vancouver in the encoraching darkness we found a wicked soundtrack radio station (Canada has more variety than the States. On the way to Calgary we had listened to a Celtic radio station playing highland music and a bhangra radio station playing Indian dance). They played us Shaft, O Brother Where Art Thou (sadly not Big Rock Candy Mountain) and a double header from Footloose and Carlitos Way. Great channel. We got into Vancouver in the nick of time and were staying in the Grand Trunk Hostel in the gaslamp district. Someone had rechristened it the Grand Drunk Hostel and we were locked out. Our phones did not work and we could not call the attendant so we were buggered. Sitting outside with loads of people queueing for the clubs it felt like Destiny crossed with Farringdon. Never good if you are sober. Some randoms came back and we snuck in. We wandered aimlessly until some Aussie took us to the attendants room. He was a strange little squat man, like one of those alien observers in the X Files. He proceeded to tell me about the bots he had discovered that lived in computers and tracked currency making you millions, but we had to keep it a secret or the government would get him and kill him for his bots. I nodded along, Ollie was visibly impatient. He eventually let us go and we went out to some local bars. Drinks were expensive and any attempt to start up conversation with the bar staff was met stiffly. Ah it was like a nightmare time warp back to England. We abandoned the night and headed back to the hostel where we hung in the kitchen with a dreadlocked Swedish guy, a Japanese dude, a guy from England who was travelling, an Irish man, a cool Aussie girl and a Belgian dude who looked like Greg Rusedski (and smoked a lot of weed). Everyone sat up drinking and smoking till 4am with people dropping off. English dude was from Southampton (where Ollie lived) and lived in London (my playground) so sadly the conversation became exlcusive for a while. Perils of common ground. You want some to keep it flowing, but not too much to cut everyone out. Especially with my alcohol fuelled gob going ten to the dozen. Eventually we ended up with the Swede Marcus talking to us about the morality of killing a cow with a bazooka. "I mean to kill a cow is not good, but at the same time I have a bazooka. A bazooka man" Absolutely class. Was a fun night, but my cough was beginning to bed down at this point. Apparently with hindsight it is highly contagious at this point so apologies to anyone who inherited it.

We had to get up by 8am the next morning to move the car as it was on a meter and we were yet to get a ticket all trip. Quite the achievement. We whacked it up in Chinatown in the middle of nowhere and abandoned it for the day. It could have been towed but we chanced it. The two of us headed up the big tower to see the city. Really beautiful, situated in a bay with the mountains behind. Sort of like a jewel squeezed between a rock and a wet place. We wandered around the local park and took in a game of 20-20 cricket between some Indian ex-pats. I still maintain that game has legs and will sit behind football as the world's number two game. We used the internet in another hostel and found out that Spurs still suck. We had been beaten by Portsmouth and were still to win a league game. The US financial system was collapsing and Judas joked online that there was a bipartisan movement to get me expelled from the US and also a petition to come back to the UK as Spurs sucked while I was away. Last time I was in Mexico they went unbeaten so it may be a productive two months now. I bumped into a strange Lithuanian guy in the hostel who was stranded in Canada, because the Americans would not let him back in so soon after he had left. He denied he was going to work illegally, but his eyes said different. Given his insistence of me clubbing in the gay district of San Fran, I figured he was heading back to live with his boyfriend down there. Ollie and I headed out to do a mini bar crawl around the town. We went to a pizza place then onto a blues bar (great music, great if unfriendly barmaids. I want Texas now dammit lol) where we got done by some dickhead Canadian at pool (He talked about his Ibiza treks. Enough said). Heading back to the hostel we joined our motley crew in the kitchen. They were accentuated by a Canadian girl, a guy from Chihuahua who had worked all over and a funny guy from Quebec. We got chatting about couchsurfing and it turns out the guy from Quebec and the Aussie girl were on it. Swapping storied, I began to chat about the guy in Venice who makes his guests wrestle in their underwear. The Irish guy had asked if we had met any shady characters. He matches people by their weight and films them wrestling. It turns out the guy from Quebec had actually stayed with him. I only knew of him from some Brazilians in London. Legendary but odd, the Quebec guy said it was really uncomfortable and when he left the Italian guy a negative reference he had gone ballistic and starting stalking him with weird messages. To be fair he sounds like a nutter. But to be fair he has all of this listed on his profile so you should know what to expect. We retired late again and in the morning went searching for our car. Initially we could not find it or the cheap hairdressers. Eventually I realised we had gone down the wrong road. We found the car and headed back down to the US. I was pleased to have visited Canada and would be back in january (which will kill me, to see my mum, flying up from Puerto Rico). There was a massive queue at the border and I was paranoid as Ollie kept getting out of the car to wander round and cutting his toenails with his penknife. I figured it would attract attention but the border crossing was smooth. He wondered how two English guys had taken a Maryland car from New York to Canada (and he didn't even know our long route), but I guess he reckoned the car company needed the car back and let us in. Again border US guards are much nicer than airport ones. Onto the Pacific Northwest.