Yesterday morning I got back from a week-long roadtrip to Montreal, and for the rest of the day I was completely out of sorts. I gulped down two liters of water, squinted my way through hundreds of blog posts, and accidentally got drunk when I had a beer before, rather than after, dinner. Today, after getting 13 hours of sleep (what experts in the field call a "hard reset"), I think I'm finally me again.

So let me tell you a tale.

On Monday morning Markie, Rachael, Cari, and Our Bold Hero left my place to go pick up Jess, who'd taken a freighter from Antwerp to Montreal at the end of her four-month European pilgrimage.

I was sort of a late addition to this roadtrip, but I'd flaked out on Jess too too many times in the past and the whole thing sounded like fun. Also, my boss had suggested that I should use up some of my half-gillion vacation days, so it was no trouble to get a week off even on somewhat short notice.

It was an interesting group. I used to live with Markie of course, but since I moved to the Hague two years ago and then again to Matt's Place last year, I've generally only hung out with her for an hour or two at a time, i.e. whenever she could make it to Girl's Night.

I don't know Cari nearly as well — mainly she's someone who shows up sometimes on Wednesday — and I'd seen Jess' sister Rachael maybe three times before. Before this trip I knew two things about her: that she'd been in Japan or something, and that she could never find our table when people met up for Happy Hour.

On the drive up Cari busted out all this farming lore and it was fascinating.

This trip was a definite strain on my introversion — as usual, jokiness quickly became my hard candy shell — but I was able to have some real conversations with everyone. And discuss Lost with Markie practically to my heart's content.

It's a 24-hour drive from here to Canada and let me tell you, that's a long time to spend inside of a Ford Taurus.

I took the first shift and to my chagrin, I found myself retracing the route I'd taken to visit the Lawrentians at Bill's cabin not two days earlier. At Wausau we started heading north through Wisconsin, then cut through the U.P. and took the Trans-Canadian highway east.

We did not see any moose on this trip, but we saw moose statues and Wisconsin's phantom road construction and a Great Lake and stores with funny names and mist on ponds and a man star-gazing on the side of the road and countless wildflowers and Canada's charging-moose roadsigns and a ghost car and the World's Largest Soup Kettle and shooting stars and old-fashioned U.P. police cruisers and clouds that crossed the road low and straight like an alternate highway.

(There are pictures of some of this, but I didn't take any pictures this trip, so I'll have to wait until Wednesday to get copies.)

I parked the car in front of our hostel on Tuesday morning, too early to check in, and there was much excitement as we met Jess and headed off to a cafe (I believe it was one of Montreal's many "mustache man" establishments) to catch up.

Jess had the most to tell of course, and while we were in Montreal she was ready with a pilgrimage story whenever we remembered to prompt her.

(It's a trite sentiment, I know, but I did get the sense that this pilgrimage has changed her somehow. I can't describe it and I can think of plenty of reasons why after four months I might see a change that isn't actually there, but that was my impression. Like I said: trite.)

After some wandering we ended up at a bar Jess knew and had some appetizers ("onions soup" for me) and some beers. I was occasionally impressed by the beers in Montreal, about which more on my drinking blog. Eventually.

The bartender there was that rare pleasure, a cool stranger. I was amused by her increasingly elaborate directions to the bathroom.

After that there might have been some more wandering. We ended up at the hostel, where we sat around and talked and received/drank gifts from Belgium. After that there was even more wandering, and we stopped off at an Irish pub before heading back. The Operation Jess crew was still exhausted from the car ride, so it was an early night.

Mornings in the hostel were lazy; we'd hang around, read, and eat breakfast before leaving for the day's wandering. Wednesday was our first alert day in Montreal, so we went over Jess' suggestions to figure out what we definitely wanted to see.

We ended up spending a few hours at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It had some good and interesting stuff, but nothing that made me really regret that I hadn't brought my camera. No Magritte, no Ernst. I like some automatist stuff, but there was way too much space given over to it. Good to know there's a label for that nonsense though.

And we had to go; I've visited the Fine Arts Museum in prettymuch every city I've ever been in. In the gift shop, I rediscovered the awesomeness of iPod gaming.

Afterwards we went to the Benelux Brasserie for lunch (Eurodogs!) and some microbrews. Rachael's friend Fred, a Montreal local, met us there, answered our questions about all things Canadian (it really bothered me to see all those circumflex accents when I didn't know what the name for that symbol was), and gave us a great tour of the city.

Since he hadn't eaten, we stopped after an hour or two for dinner at an Irish pub, where he introduced us to both the Black Velvet (cider and Guinness in Montreal) and poutine, Quebec's signature snack.

Afterwards: more wandering. I walked more in three days in Montreal than I would in a month in Minnesota.

At one point I casually mentioned that this U.S. election is a tough one for libertarians, what with a libertarian-hating war-monger on the right and a, well, Democrat on the left, and of course I made the mistake of using universal healthcare as one of my examples.

I don't care how libertarian you are: this is a faux pas when you're speaking to an actual Canadian. Fred was a good sport about it though, showing us his card and telling us how great it was to get healthcare for free after waiting eight hours in line behind someone with a runny nose.

On Thursday while Rachael succumbed to the lure of Chinatown, the rest of us walked to the bohemian district or the hippie district or possibly both. I didn't have any navigation responsibilities while we were in Montreal and I think that we can all agree that that's a good thing.

Eventually we met up again with Rachael at the hostel and had cheese and crackers (I'd brought four pounds of Wisconsin cheese for the trip, including a terrible block of caraway cheese) along with Markie's patented box o' wine. It was a very relaxed, casual lunch. I mean, I think it took us hours to finish that box.

On our last foray into the city we did some souvenir shopping (I got a Montreal beer mug, as I generally despise souvenirs that I can't use), and had dinner at Les 3 Brasseurs, home of the Meter of Beer.

(All the French in Quebec threw me off quite a bit, but the metric system was only confusing when buying gas. $1.20/litre tells me essentially nothing.)

We stopped at the "mustache man" for some snacks before heading back to the hostel, then spent the rest of the night drinking and, for a change, actually socializing with the other travelers at the hostel.

I'd spent the whole trip hoping that I'd be able to use my German, but I was past the magic "Blaudeutsch" stage when I met a guy from Reutlingen. No, he did not know Arno. The conversation basically ended there. While I nursed my last beer, I talked to some young kids from New York, mainly about Lost because I couldn't think of any other viable topics.

The next morning I decided to take some aspirin instead of waiting around for the hangover express, then packed almost everything I'd brought and got the car from the parking garage. At around nine we left the hostel and started the long journey back, a little more cramped in my car than we were before.

I'm still planning to write about this in two other blogs and in my own private analog journal — so yes, I'll spend all day today writing — but that's prettymuch our trip.

I'll leave you with the music video for what became our roadtrip's official song: