“Is this our first real road trip as a married couple?” Pierre asks me. He looks like he’s about to get all misty-eyed.
I think for a moment. “You mean besides our honeymoon?” We took a 10-day road trip through Western Newfoundland and Labrador.
“Oh, yeah,” says Pierre. “That.”
The road trip goes the way most road trips go. There is a lot of sitting. We don't really like to stop once we're on a roll, but we take a short break to check out the Terry Fox memorial just outside Thunder Bay:
On the first day we drive 14 hours and make it to Wawa. We randomly choose a roadside motel called “White Fang” because it’s the first place we pass when we get near town. We’re not expecting much – the last time I stayed in a roadside motel along this highway was about 15 years ago. The room back then was pretty basic and tiny and, with rooms at the White Fang going for 65$ a night, I figure things probably haven’t changed much. Instead, the room is gorgeous and cozy and we think it looks like something from a style magazine. Or maybe we just had very low expectations. Either way, we eat well and sleep well and get going early in the morning.
People complain about the prairies being monotonous to drive through, but I think the drive up to Northwestern is a close second in terms of monotony. Not boring, exactly, just not much variety in a lot of ways. We listen to music, and amuse ourselves with the road signs. There are a lot of lakes and roads to be named, so there are hints of humour and artistic touch in various places. Near Wawa we pass Mom Lake, Dad Lake and Baby Lake. Not long after, we pass Desolation Lake and eventually wander past a sign pointing towards “The Yellow Brick Road.”
The further north we travel, the more often we see the small traffic signs in the ditches, installed for the snowmobilists in winter.
We find the city/town highway signs a bit mysterious. Often a town will be announced by a sign but then there’s no sign of the town itself for miles and miles. Often we pass through a town completely without ever seeing anything that we could identify as a town. We feel a little homesick for the European system of identifying town limits with two signs: a sign before the town says: Blind River. And then, at the point at which the city limits end, you find a second sign, with the name Blind River with a red line through it. Clear and easy.
We read out loud the town mottos when we see them.
Espanola – Not just a fine paper town.
Nipigon – Nestled in Nature.
“More like ‘Adrift in nature’,” Pierre says.
Mid-October is late autumn for this part of the country – they’ve already had several centimeters of snow come and go in most places. Northwestern Ontario colours in late fall remind me of photos left in the sun too long. Yellow, green, beige. Yellow lines and road signs. White leafless birch trees. Gray phone poles, poplar trunks, side railings and asphalt. Once in a while we pass by a royal blue lake, depending on the angle of the sun, but usually they’re a dark grey while the sky is a faded blue. The colours mostly come from one side of the colour wheel, and the warm tones of red and orange are missing. Instead, some days the landscape is a palette of sickly yellows and ill-mixed greens – puce-coloured cliffs and shrubs the green of canned peas. I think I lived here too long as a kid to find every part of every season charming.
When we finally reach Dryden (Ontario’s leading small city) we’re glad to stop. Mom spoils us with home cooking and my favourite snack food, which we can’t find in southern Ontario, La Cocina chips. We gorge ourselves and go to sleep.
Time at mom’s is always mellow and always involves a trip to the library to pick up a ridiculous number of books to flip through in our spare time. We visit, eat, go for walks down the back road and watch the occasional movie.
On Day 349, we drive up to my hometown to visit some friends. Pierre has never had a chance to visit my town, or meet any of the friends I grew up with, so it’s a chance for everyone to meet and greet and eat some food. We eat bran muffins with my friend Barb and cruise around town a little. The architecture in town tends to be pretty spare but there's something about the colours and angles and bare-boned-ness of it that I really love. The town isn't very pretty but it does have it's moments when it's kind of handsome.
My friend Liane and her husband graciously host us for the night and spoil us with an amazing meal. We house hop and drink tea, beer, scotch, and play rock band.
There’s a Hallowe’en game going on in town, and my friend Liane has a few bags of candy she has to give away. It’s a bit like candy tag, and works like this: You hear a knock on the door, and when you look outside all you see is a bag of candy. A note inside explains that you have been “ghosted.” Your assignment is then to cut out the image of the ghost provided and stick it to your door so that people will know that you’ve already been tagged. You have to put together three bags of candy complete with instructions, and knock on someone else’s door. The catches are that you can’t be caught by the person – it has to be a mystery who dropped it off with them – but you also can’t leave the bag on the doorstep if no one comes out to claim it: the candy could attract animals that way, which wouldn't be good.
We take the bags out for a walk and unload them at a couple of houses that haven’t yet been ghosted. I find a loophole in the rules and take advantage - almost every single house in my town has a two-door system at the front: screen door, wood door. I accept that it’s not ok to leave the candy on the doorstep, but it seems perfectly ok to leave it between these doors if no one comes out. We use this system on two doors; at the third door someone comes outside but they don’t catch sight of us.
The night is as varied and rambling as I remember our nights of drinking in high school: we drop by the Legion briefly, stop by someone’s house for a few drinks, listen to a bit of live guitar, wander home in the dark, cutting through the ditches to shave a few minutes off our time. It’s possible to walk across most of town in about 10 or 15 minutes in any direction, so the walk is always pretty short to begin with.
Morning is a slow start with coffee and toast and a chance to finally see the video and photos from Liane's wedding that we had to miss this past summer. We leave our lovely hosts so they can take the afternoon to catch a bit more sleep and enjoy the rest of their Sunday. My friends’ parents treat us to lunch and reminiscing before Pierre and I officially settle back in the car to leave town. We take a final tour around town, which doesn’t take long at all, and head back up the highway to mom’s house, an hour and a half away.
The three of us spend a few more days talking, reading, eating, walking and enjoying the surroundings. A few deer wander by...
...and, one night, the sky shows off a little:
Pierre and I finally start the long drive home early on Day 353. Our on-the-road entertainment alternates between random music and a book on tape: “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. We start it on a whim thinking that Pierre might enjoy it since it touches on astronomy, physics and science. It’s a good call: we can hardly bring ourselves to turn it off. The first day we drive ten hours, the second day - fourteen. At least half of both days is spent listening to the Bryson, and we make it back to town in the early evening.
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