On The Road

“Where ya goin’ na, eh?”

“Whoa! You’re a long way, na?”

Loose translation: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

Polite to a fault but less conscious of personal boundaries, more than a few Canadians have done a double-take at my Montana plates and followed up with questions. When I tell ‘em Newfoundland, I might as well say I’m driving to Mongolia.

Leaving the ol’ GMGM, I plowed through eastern Montana, North Dakota and a confusing amalgam of Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, slowing only as I approached the world’s friendliest border at Sault Ste. Marie. Trying to get information about the Sault was an experience that I’ll have to parody more in the future. More than half a dozen people in the UP, some within 150 miles of the place, proclaimed that they’d ‘never been that way’ or proclaimed no knowledge of the town. I was waiting for a grizzled old man with an eye patch to step out of the shadows and growl, ‘Aye, fair traveler, there be dragons to the east.’

Given the whispers and wide-eyed gasps, I was prepared to drop off the edge of the earth. Instead, I arrived at a border station staffed by bored CBSA agents (the place was almost completely empty). I successfully convinced a uniformed CBSA kid that, yes, I am actually a 39 year-old American going to school in a region of Canada about which he’s probably heard only vague rumors. I then spent a few shamelessly relaxed days in the care of a friend from days past. Tina and her husband Paul fed me, showed me the local sights in the Sault and generally helped me ignore the huge, overwhelming risk that I’m engaged in.

I headed out from the Sault through Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. Ottawa and Montreal were, to this small-town rube, intimidatingly large cities while Quebec City was about the same size as Austin (500,000) when I lived there back in the day. It also probably didn’t help that my only familiarity with Ottawa was seeing Mac Hudson fly over its skyline in the Guardian suit (if you’ve never heard of John Byrne or Alpha Flight, just skip that reference). By Monday the 7th, I was out of Quebec and I could once again read highway signage.

I’ll pass through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on Tuesday. Once I get to Sydney, NS, I’ll leave terra firma for the rock (via a 6-hour ride aboard a superferry). After a few additional days of driving, totaling 8 or 9 days, I should arrive in St. John’s. Not bad time for covering a distance measuring 45% of the planet’s diameter.

In conclusion, then, I have traveled through some of the least populated areas in the United Sates and some of the most populated areas in the Dominion of Canada. And it wasn’t all that easy to tell the difference.