Sunday night. Thus endeth the vacation: after 424 miles and eight hours of driving, we’ve made it from rural Quebec to Niagara Falls (the Canadian site, naturally). The AirBnB condo looks like an Instagram photoshoot setting that escaped from 2015, but it’ll do. About half the condos in this three-story building seem to be AirBnB suites. We’re on the top floor, which cuts down the exposure to neighbours.

The drive was mostly uneventful. Xgf and I are still cool and chill and civil, and work fine together as an apocalyptic team. There was just one roadblock when we left Mont-Tremblant, but the two cops were fine when we explained we’d spent a whole month self-isolating by ourselves. As we crossed the bridge from Quebec to Ottawa, we saw that the lane heading into Quebec was completely blocked: there were five or six police cars, sirens all around, and an awful lot of cops (or gendarmes?) collecting overtime by hanging out. I wonder if Quebec has completely blocked all the incoming traffic. That’d make it twice as odd that they let us leave without any trouble. Huh.

It’ll be odd to go back to the work mode in just eight or so hours… Lots of email to catch up on. Video conferences. Phone calls. Back to the old routine.

I look forward to exploring Niagara Falls. If I’m right, the casinos and all the tourist traps are shut down, and the streets will be empty. This is our third AirBnB: Deep River was as rural as rural gets; Mont Tremblant was a tourist trap with an actual little town just a few miles away; Niagara Falls is an actual city. If the streets are empty, and if the stores are closed – and maybe even boarded up – it’ll make for some bizarre zombie movie vibes as we walk around.

The virus news is more of the same old, same old. The most interesting development is that Kim Jong Un appears to be dead: either a botched heart surgery or the virus got to him as well. Nobody knows for sure, but he missed an awful lot of important events, and now it looks like his sister will take over.

Off to bed now… Cumulative deaths as of right now in the US: 55,512; in Canada, 2,687. No new words for the novel.