Trains, trains, and automobiles Pt II.

The first thing I do when I wake up is try to find Brendan. I thought I knew where he was sleeping, but alas I did not. So I sent him a text and went to the highway to thumb.

I was there for a couple of hours before I got a text from Brendan, he started hitching about 3/4 of a km behind me.

After about a total of three hours of not getting any rides, I decided I wanted to go for a walk. I'd continue hitching while I walked. Something was off. As I passed Brendan I told him my plan and continued eastward on the trans Canada 11 highway. I walked for a while, and then I just started crying. Hard, loud, uncontrollable sobs. I don't really know where it came from, it just sort of snuck up on me. I started texting back and forth with Leann, I was feeling very hopeless and broken. I didn't want to get too heavy on here, but it's an important part of the story. I cried for about an hour, only doing my best to stop when a vehicle approached. I was alone with several kilometers of highway in front and behind me, and many many kilometers of forest to my sides, being eaten alive by bugs, wailing like I haven't done since my grandfather's funeral, and not since being a very young child before that.

When I was done crying, I felt better. I realized that I could overcome this obstacle, and that I wouldn't be stranded in Longlac, Ontario forever. It was also a moment of clarity, where I knew I could handle my life by myself. I'm very thankful for the friends and family that I have, as well as Leann; but I AM CAPABLE alone if I need to be.

That was a very important moment for me, and I think I'm probably stronger for it than I've been since before I started dealing with mental illness this winter.

Brendan texted me, and he suggested we go and check out bus prices to see if we could get out of Longlac. I walked back into town and found that I could get a train ticket for the next day straight to Montreal and it would cost me $175. That's a lot of money I didn't really have, but I decided to do it anyway, it just seemed like the right thing to do. So now we had tickets, but we were still marooned in Longlac for another 26 hours. The shopkeep suggested that we could hang out in the Via rail station waiting room.

When we got to the Via station, it was a building that I'm surprised hasn't been condemned, but it had some sort of air conditioning, and it was damn hot outside. We laid out all of our wet stuff to dry because there wasn't a person in sight. We basically squatted the place for the entire next day with the exception of heading to the beach for a couple of hours. It was kind of nice to have a place to kinda sorta call our own.

We played a lot of Nintendo DS and I slept a lot. I was feeling under the weather, and I hate getting sick, so I just make myself rest as much as humanly possible. The only people who came in was a woman to stock the toilet paper, a couple of CN employees from next door to use the washroom, and one woman in the middle of the night who was walking her dog and wanted to steal some hand towels. She was nice, and tried to sell us weed lol. We got so comfortable that we were cooking crude meals with my fuel and burner inside the building.

We caught the train outside our day-long squat, and we were officially on our way out of Longlac toward Montreal, our salvation.

The train ride was great, the employees were super nice, and we had outlets for our Nintendo DS's and to charge our cell phones. I spent most of the first night hanging out in the diner car trading stories with a few people who were having trouble sleeping.

In the morning we changed trains in Toronto and rode until supper time into Montreal. The Montreal-bound train had free Wi-Fi which I took advantage of for a while, but all in all it was uneventful.

Now we're in Montreal! We were surprise greeted by C and D at the train station! It was nice to see familiar faces. We walked toward Carolyne's place where we're staying tonight (correction, Brendan is off somewhere else now) and I've just been dickering on the internet for hours, I hope she doesn't mind too much that I've taken over her computer lol.

Tomorrow is a mystery to be unveiled!