You wouldn't tell a Jigger not to Jig

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:

-Lord Byron (Ryan McCan)

So when we last left off we were in Thompson, Manitoba Canada. I had quite a time there as Lauren told you. This surprised us both as we thought she would be the one to have fun in this town. Now, Lauren just had to go to Thompson, Manitoba, something about a pilgrimage and "I wouldn't understand something so anglo-saxon". But it was ok because now we were way the fuck up there and that was all we ever wanted. The only trouble with being this far North was that Lthomps couldn't stop shaking uncontrollably; she just couldn't come to terms with how far we were from the equator. That poor Emerson Dance major, I just wish the real world hadn't been so shocking to her.

But anyway, it was our duty to continue on. From here we traveled for quite a while on creepy ass roads until we got to Troy Lake. Well actually, all of Canada at this point was made up of creepy roads. And I got the heebee geebees pretty bad. So between Lauren's seizures and my general fright, we were quite the pair!

Once we got passed Lake Troy we no longer knew where we were at all. We just vaguely (and ironically, of course) knew we were going North. We saw blurry images of snow and trees whizz by us, made all the more disturbing by our attempts to cheer each other up with songs like, "My Life Would Suck Without You" and "Oh Girl". Not to mention Lauren's random Marxist exclamations. Somewhere way the fuck up there, we stopped at a gas station, and the unthinkable happened. We were ambushed by neo-tribalists! They came crawling out from under the tires in the body shop, they jumped down from the roof, they slid out of the vending machines!




"You, 'AMERICANS', take a look at our pamphlets. You may have a chance to be saved from your erroneous lifestyles after all."


"Please just leave us alone", Lauren screamed as she doused them in precious gasoline.


"HOW DARE YOU POUR THAT GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA ON OUR VIRGIN BODIES!" Yelled the neo-tribalists.


"Lets get out of here, Lauren!", I exclaimed.


"WAIT! We just want to show you that you are merely pawns in a game of chess. PAWNS."


But we were gone. We found out later it was a miracle that, that amount of douche bag intake didn't kill us. Oh, but we were lucky more than once on our trip.




(Typical Neo-Tribalist)

Finally we reached Kugaaruk, Nunavut and it was time to begin the long hard journey of island hopping. Holy Hell, you should just bow to us for being able to do this. For Christ's sake, it really is physically impossible, but if we knew one thing about Russians, it's that Dostoyevsky was probably the first existentialist. Using this knowledge we concluded that just because something is fact doesnt mean it can stop us from driving to Russia. That's what I wish I could get through to the single, working class moms. But they told me to fuck off and try working two jobs and then see if I have time to be smart. I tried to tell them that I can't work because I'm in college and college is incredibly difficult, but they just kept flipping me off. Poor misguided fools.



But I digress...





IF YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW HAS BEEN HARMED OR VERBALLY HARRASSED BY A NEO-TRIBALIST CALL THIS NUMBER NOW: 978-835-1712.

The Canadian Frightfest

March 8-11, 2009
Montreal, Quebec to Thompson, Manitoba...both in Canada. 3,000 miles off the beaten path.

We never got a chance to hang out in Montreal, as much as we wanted to beat up some fake French kids. We were too excited to get to the cave clubs up North that we'd heard so much about...man, we weren't disappointed.

The Versa held up really well under the pressure of driving a thousand miles a day. To appease her, we stayed mostly on the King's highways so she felt more royal. In fact, we mostly wanted to take the King's highways just so that we could intimidate the Canadian drivers and show them that we
A.) Are American, and therefore impervious to their witchcraft and northerly trickery,
B.) Are superior drivers, therefore not held to the "2 Mississippi" rule when it comes to following distance to the car in front of us....yeah...Versa Rule #1 is that if you can see the license plate of the car, you aren't driving close enough,
C.) holla'd at a bunch of hottie Canadian women. Canadian men were too busy hanging from Pine Trees in flannel watching hockey or making free doctor's appointments. SO YEAH, these were some of the bitties we hit up in Thunder Bay:

(courtesy discovervancouver.com)
As you can see, Ronny and I were spreading Spring Break cheer long before we hit the U.S.S.R.

The best part about the second day of the trip was that I knew where we were headed, and V-Ron didn't. I told her that kind of information was privileged to only those who know how to drive vehicles outfitted with a manual transmission. Since we were the only two bitches on the trip, that means I was the only one driving, and the only one knowing where we were headed:



HELLO???!! A town in Manitoba called Thompson? you KNOW we're hittin that shit up. The only bullshit part of the whole she-bang is that, according to GoogleMaps, there is no easy way to drive to Thompson.

Whaaa????!!!! How is that possible? Terrain is terrain, no matter how you look at it. And Canadian terrain is utterly driveable.


Manitobans were the best part about Manitoba. We rarely encountered any, so we assumed they were cool with/understanding of our discomfort with being around Canadians. Why can't more Canadians be as compassionate as the Manitobans???? And when we did have to interact face to face with them, they were still cool. In fact, when we checked into the Thompson Days Inn at around 8:45 pm, They didn't even charge us when I gave them my Visa Platinum CheckCard and they saw my last name. Probably because they'd never seen a credit card before, but we gave them the benefit of the doubt. I then insisted we stay in the royal suite, considering we'd been traveling on the King's Highway for most of the day anyway.

A few things about Thompson, MB, Canada:
1.) it is the third largest city in Manitoba with a WHOPPING 13,000 people.
2.) average temperature during the month of March is 20 degrees. YUMMY.
3.) IT'S REKNOWNED IN MUSIC and FOLKLORE!!!! The city was used in the Tragically Hip song "Thompson Girl". The song is set both in and north of Thompson, and is about the title character, a Thompson girl. One of the band members, rumor has it, dated a teacher from Thompson's daughter for a brief period, and thus the song was inspired.
WOW.

I went to the bathroom to change into my bathing suit before we headed down to the hotel pool, but when I came out I saw Veronica passed out on the bed. There was an empty bottle of Quaaluds next to her.
I sighed. I didn't realize how taxing the journey could be on her frail little Lithuanian body. So I tucked her in and then went down to the pool alone to play with some vacationing couple's kids.

we still have maybe 10,000 miles to travel before we get to St. Petersburg! That's 16,000 kilometers to you, Canucks.

National Geographic?

Note: All of this has been translated from our original Russian blog. This explains any grammatical/spelling errors.

A couple years ago a good friend of mine told me that the most sought after job is being a photojournalist for national geographic. You get paid a ton, you get to travel, you get to express yourself, and you get plenty of recognition. This is relevent to the travel's of Lthomp's and myself insofar as it proves that geography is something everyone secretly loves. It also points to the beauty of the Lthomps-Veron John partnership. Lthomps goes to Emerson College, and as we all know that is a silly school in which people major in things such as "love" and "dance". However people there also major in photography. So she's got that side covered. I, on the other hand, go to a real university. Life is hard, I have to take classes like "biology" and "latin". But I also took a geography class. So you see, Lthomp's knows the photojournalism, and I know the important things.

Great, so now that I have convinced you that Lewis and Clark had nothing on us perhaps I can interest you in a story. A story concerning our first and most talked about trip:

St. Petersburg Russia.

Many people said that this trip couldn't be. "Northern Canada and Northern Russia don't connect." True, but what this working class, single mom didn't know is that the two places don't need to connect at all. They only need to sort of connect. We only need the two continents to be close enough together so that a sort of "skimming" (trademark) phenomenon can occur. Luckily in Lthomp's and myself's Harvard day we learned many things about Russia, in a book that I can't help but reference: "Born to Kvetch". We learned from our comrades at Harvard that Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are two major Russian authors. We also knew from our nobel tutor Prof. DelleChaiae that Joseph Conrad was originally from Russia but later moved to England. Using this knowledge we decided that we would prove the nay-saying, working class, single moms WRONG.

And then came the big let down: the facebook group tease. We created a facebook group to see if anyone would like to join us for Spring break in St. Petersburg (not florida LOL), and many people-to our delight- responded with an affirmative YES. We began to make the preparations. I stole $50 worth of snack from CVS risking my LIFE, Lthomp's cleaned out her car (which involved reliving many painful memories for her), and we both were all a-giggle as the long anticipated day approached.

And then the day came. And Lthomp's and I were the only one's there. What a great way to start the trip: rejection. Mother Fucking REJECTION.

But we went anyway, we weren't going to let those working class, single moms have the last laugh. Ohhhh no, then they'd have everything. So we packed up the car (mostly the snacks) and left our home of Boston. As we saw that beautiful city shrink in the rear view mirror of Lthomp's Versa, we shed a tear, one tear between the two of us, and remembered that we had actually not spent most of our lives in Boston and identified more with cities like Lowell and Lawrence. But still...

We made our way North deciding to try to make it to Montreal that day (we didn't want to drive much the first day because our hearts were heavy with the pains of rejection). We took the way I took to get to UVM (the university I attended this past year but am transferring from in order to further enhance my cartographing skills), 93 to 89. We blasted through the three hours entertaining ourselves with stories and porn. When we got to Burlington Lthomp's and I found it quite impossible not to smoke a J as they say in that fine town, and then we just sort of fell asleep for 3 hours in a field of hippies. When we woke up we were quite angry to discover our folly. "What fools we are!" I exclaimed to Lthomps. "Why yes, how inconvenient." We promptly got supplies from KKD's and then hit the road for Montreal, only an hour and a half from Burlington.

We found no problems at the border, apart from the fact that the passport attendent thought Lthomp's was black and so held her for further questioning. But luckily she convinced him that she was not black and so was able to cross the border. Then it was basically a straight shot to MTL (montreal). When we got to the city it was 11:30 pm (eastern standard time) and we decided to stay in a hostel despite that movie that was made 2 years ago. And from there it is history....

Dreams of a Russian Paradise

Just one of the many visions dancing in our heads the eve of our sojourn across the great North.

Spring Break '09: St. Petersburg, Russia

Spring Break is a tradition that has been honored by college kids at least since MTV invented it in the early 90s.
Ronny and I live for MTV. We also live for Coronas and limes and bikinis. So what better course of action do we have, other than to hit 'em up style last March, in the sunniest, and funniest, place on Earth?

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL PROPOSAL FOR THE TRIP:

So, where were you originally planning to go, Spring Breakers?
Cancun?
Aspen?
Toronto? London?

WRONG.

This is the plan:
Between March 7th and the 15th, a bunch of us will be driving my little hatchback to Russia. THE PARTY SCENE IN ST. PETERSBURG IS OUT OF THIS MUHFUGGIN WORLD. It's totally worth the few thousand dollars in gas. And the arctic chills and skirmishes. We will drive north until it is south, essentially.
In further detail....
We will set out from Boston, make way north via Ontario, to Manitoba, and even Nunavut, Canada. But we insist on getting ALL OF IT.
From Nunavut, we will keep driving over the ice peaks parallel to the Baffin Sea. we may have to stop to construct rafts to ferry over the Versa, but it will feel like Island hopping. ELLEESMEERE ISLAND

After a rousing stop in Ellesmere Island, we will continue to drive (South?) into Siberia. We will then forge on southwest until we make it to sunny, and funny, St. Petersburg!!!!!!!

At. Route: For the fainter of heart, we are also entertaining the idea of driving westbound to St. AWESOME, through Alaska, and just raft over into Eastern Russia. But then we would miss an integral lesson in Viking survival (?) Right?

Still unsure of where we will stay...so many places cater the college set.....will keep you posted!!! Hope you can come!!!!

This is the beginning of one hell of a break.

Google Earth 5.0

(St. Petersburg)

Better than any douchy GPS system.

MISSION STATEMENT

Hi. My name is Lauren. This here is my friend Veronica. We are two girls, looking to have a good time, preferably in your neighborhood. If there's room. But only if it is
TOTALLY EXOTIC.
These are the supplies we have:
1. 2007 Nissan Versa hatchback in Powder White, manual transmission. That's stick-shift, beehotches.
2. GoogleMaps. Even though they say it's impossible for us to calculate a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, from North Andover---they are mistaken, but we will still use them.
3. SNACKS. Veronica stole a TON of them from CVS.
4. Invaluable goods to trade with natives. This includes, but is not limited to:
A. A copy of Damien, by Herman Hesse.
B. Boxes of Nips.
C. Ryan McCann et. al. I don't know what et. al. means. Clearly.
D. A collector's edition of Blue Crush.
E. Virgins.
5. Castor oil. I heard this is a useful thing to have for basic medicinal purposes...we don't know how to get our hands on Penicillin.

We're going to get going soon to our first location, so we have to talk to you later. But listen, if you want to come, there's a lot of room in the Versa. Not so many snacks, though.