Cross Country Canada

Having had little time to breathe for the first 4 weeks into our adventure, I haven’t been able to collect my scratchy notes of our cross country trek until now. Unfortunately, this will be excessively long otherwise it will be completely out of order and even more confusing. But I want to put it somewhere as a reminder of or our growing patience, our ability to work together, and the banality of the obstacles we have, and will likely face, that often seem insurmountable in the immediate.

Day 1: We left Calgary during rush hour on a Monday evening with everything we could carry. We had intended to leave a day earlier than we did, but I severely underestimated how time intensive and emotionally exhausting packing would be. Meanwhile, Josh overestimated the capacity of our car and truck, and despite his best efforts, and some very clever solutions – he packed our snowboards in the canoe – we had to leave behind all our camping gear and his favourite chair. We only got to Medicine Hat the first night, but it was a good start and we were glad to leave Alberta slowly. On the way out we passed through the southern foothills of the Cypress Hills-variety and several bison farms. We love bison!

Despite all the jabs Saskatchewan gets we have a soft spot for the province after a Canada Day camping trip to Grasslands National Park. The valleys make the region anything but flat and the night skies are unbelievable. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better view of the Milky Way. The park also has wild buffalo!

Day 2: Reminiscing was the upswing to day two of the trek. The drive was easy and the truck and trailer were working out pretty well. Or so we thought… We gassed up in Brandon and soon after started hearing an engine knock and couldn’t find anywhere to pull over until we got to Winnipeg! We pulled into Canadian Tire for an OBD reader because, despite all of our plans to buy one online for $10, we never did. We picked a $79.99 unit and headed to the checkout, where the till displayed $90.39. A full $6.00 more than we would have paid in Alberta! That was our first taste of 13% HST and it was pretty sour…

We couldn’t identify any serious issue, but topped up the oil which was getting low. We left Winnipeg after 10pm having taken a wrong turn somewhere and ending up on streets so narrow they would have barely accommodated a rickshaw never mind a full-sized truck pulling a car trailer! Exhausted, we rolled across the Ontario border around midnight while Momma I’m Coming Home blared on the radio with the windows open to a 26° night. We got the last room in the Kenora Super 8, the Honeymoon Suite…

Day 3: We expected a long but easy ride from Kenora to Wawa the third day. We put some more oil in the truck and left. At this point the Trans-Canada becomes the 17 and is more like a secondary highway than the Highway 1 we’re used to between Calgary and Banff. It was fairly uneventful, but the truck was starting to struggle more. By the time we reached Thunder Bay we knew we would have to get it fixed before we could keep going. We limped into Done-Rite Tire and Auto just before they closed. They were very accommodating and let us leave the whole rig in their yard overnight promising to look at the truck first thing in the morning.

We walked across the street to get a room in the nearby hotel, but they were full and said you’d be hard-pressed to find a room in Thunder Bay without a reservation as it’s the only stop for a long way in either direction. Josh called around to a few places, and found us a hotel on the water so we walked an hour to the Prince Arthur which reminded me of the King Eddy in Calgary. It was reminiscent of a Hollywood asylum and later Google advised it was haunted... It was a good spot though, and after a quick nap we walked over to Live on the Waterfront, a free music festival on Wednesday evenings throughout the summer! Then we followed a poster advising of hipster hangouts up the street and had some good eats. Thunder Bay was a place we knew nothing about and would probably never have gone out of our way to visit, but it turned out to be quite a nice city and we’d totally go back. Especially for free music festivals!

Day 4: We woke up early, apprehensive about what news we might get back about the truck. We were pretty concerned it would be a major fix and require a lotta dollas, but the shop couldn’t find any real issue. It was definitely leaking oil, like a lot of oil, but they couldn’t identify where it was coming from or what was causing it. They changed the oil and said we should have no trouble getting to Ottawa.

We left Thunder Bay around noon with a quarter tank of gas expecting to get to Sault Saint Marie that night. Following Siri’s directions, we headed north to detour some construction on the Trans-Canada. Shortly after turning off the highway we lost cell service, but the map showed a secondary highway that reconnected with the Trans-Canada after about 80km right about where the next gas station would be. After about 30 minutes up this road and a low-fuel warning we rechecked Siri’s map and found that the road we were on no longer looped back to the highway but headed straight north! The hell, Siri?!?!

We decided we’d better turn around and hoped we could make it back to Thunder Bay, but didn’t get very far before we completely ran out of gas… Fortunately, a car pulled over with us to see if we were okay and gave us a jerry can with about a half litre in it. We thanked them and told them not to worry about calling a tow truck because we figured we could just siphon the gas out of the Kia for the truck. So we set to work deconstructed a few things looking for an appropriate hose, but despite our best efforts couldn’t get through all the traps to the tank...

We eventually broke down and made a ‘Got Gas?’ sign and some helpful bro-dudes gave us about 10 litres and told us Orr’s Place, a house? with pumps, should be able to sell us some gas just a few more kilometres down the road. When we arrived, the woman working said she would be happy to sell us some gas, but that she was all out because for two weeks the same thing had been happening non-stop -- people had been following Siri’s directions and then running out of gas on the back highway that dead ends at Armstrong! Wherever that is... She’d even tried contacting Apple to get it corrected. Anyway, we kept going, bought some gas off a guy with a boat and finally made it back to Thunder Bay.

Still Day 4: We filled up, got some gas station lunch, and left Thunder Bay for the second time around 4pm with a new plan to get to Wawa. Luckily, the north end of Lake Superior turned out to be my new favourite part of Canada which made up for the very long day. The landscape was stunning! The rocky hills of the Canadian Shield are blanketed in boreal forest against the backdrop of one of Earth’s largest freshwater lakes. Unreal. As we ended up making most of this drive as the sun was setting, the colours were also amazing.

Despite wanting to continue to Sault Saint Marie, we checked into a hotel in Wawa my aunt had booked for us because “everyone knows the moose danger is too high between Thunder Bay and Sault Saint Marie to travel after dark.” It was like staying in your grandmother-in-law’s house in 1979 and your grandmother-in-law was Mrs. Bates.

We got out of there as soon as we could in the morning and had an uneventful drive to Toronto except for the car fire I saw on the highway outside of Sudbury that we didn’t get a picture of because I was driving and Josh was napping… We were completely worn out when we finally got to Toronto. I had no idea how much pressure sitting for five straight days would put on your body. My legs and feet had alternated between twinges and throbs for several days and my butt ached! But we had made it with 18 hours to spare before my aunt’s wedding and we were grateful to have a few days to rest before the last portion of the trek to Ottawa. Josh offloaded the car and returned the trailer while I had a fatigue-induced meltdown, and then we spent several days vegetating around my aunts house with a rotating collection of friends and relatives from Canada, the UK, and Australia. Thank goodness the drive was over!

Day 5: 5 days later we left for Ottawa with no time to waste! We stopped at a real estate brokerage on the highway outside of Smiths Falls an hour south of Ottawa, and then made arrangements to meet with an agent the very next day.

We got to Ottawa late in the afternoon where we had arranged to stay with my aunt for a few weeks while we looked for a place to live. We settled into a hectic routine of early mornings, late nights, infrequent meals, and a collection of activities that needed to be done to secure a home while also fulfilling our existing obligations and starting new endeavours...

#Relocating #GotGas #CarTrouble #RoadTrip