Planning and Travelling to Canada

Yesterday I spent the day in the hotel business center organising stuff for my trip north. Shit was getting pretty stressful as I still had not heard back from Pam, who I was going to stay with in Abbotsford. I resorted to facebook messaging people I could find on her facebook. Luckily her sister got a message and told Pam to check her account and all has hopefully worked out fine.

I also did some job searching and sent a few emails to engineeringey places. Its all pretty daunting and I'm really not looking forward to it to be honest. I think I am just going with the scattergun approach by emailing as many places as possible to hopefully set up some meetings to see if anything is available. After doing some work on it I feel a bit better but I think its gonna be pretty difficult.

That is it for Portland then. Thanks so much to my host Jesse for all of the sweet trips and all of the driving to get to them. I'd say we covered nearly 1000km in the long weekend! Portland is a pretty cool place, awful weather but I guess you get that from all of the hills around it. Plus that is probably why it is such a forested area. Cheers again Jesse!

So I am now sitting on the Bus to Canada. Got about 10 hours of travelling ahead of me today and I'm hoping my tablet battery will last for most of it.

One more travelling problem: At the border there was only one guy on so it took a while for everyone to get processed. My visa, of course, took the longest which held us up. The driver seemed pretty pissed off and could see it wasn't my fault but wasn't sure if I would be able to catch the 8:30pm bus to Abbotsford from Vancouver. I could see this going pants pretty quick because I only had a land line number for Pam and a night in Vancouver would be a bit shit. Luckily we made it with about 5min to spare and then at the bus they told me I needed a baggage ticket. That meant lugging my pack into the building and getting a baggage ticket but driver had already taken my bus ticket (I had asked him if I needed it to get a bag ticket and he said it would be fine). The people inside then were also pissed off that I didn't have my ticket but begrudgingly gave me a bag ticket and told me to be here earlier next time. Just shit I didn't need but everything seemed to work out all right.

And for the final instalment in my travel to Canada fiasco: I nearly missed getting off my bus at Abbotsford because I was engrossed in an episode of Breaking Bad. Then I waited at the bus station for a while. I was expecting Pam to pick me up so I was kinda worried about what was going on. It didn't look like I was near anything and I think it was a bit cold to sleep outside. I couldn't find Wifi and I only had a landline number for Pam which would have been expensive to call on my cell. I decided to try using a good old fashioned pay phone (which accepted my credit card). Technology eh? Turns out there was a mis-understanding and Pam thought I was getting in at 10:30pm instead of 9:30. Now I am typing this in Pams lounge it all seems OK but its funny what runs through your head when you are standing in the middle of a foreign place with very limited ways of contacting people.