Driving Adventures

In car advertisements it seems that there are never any other cars on the road. I can tell you right now, that is a fantasy. At least where I live, you are pretty much surrounded by cars. It was not always like that. In 1903, the first car crossed the entire USA, driven by Dr. Horatio Jackson. That trip is closer to my idea of fun than sitting still in the morning commute on the 401 going in to Toronto surrounded by other cars and trucks doing the same speed (0).

A hundred years ago, you had to be tough to drive a car. And I don't mean that you had to have enough strength to crank down a window of a car, you had to have enough strength to crank the engine of the car. In the early days, on a trip of over a hundred miles, you would normally bring along 4 spare tires and be lucky if you didn't use them all.

So enough reminiscing about the good old days that I actually didn't live through. Today I rebel against all this traffic by driving a stick shift with no air conditioning, and crank windows.

There are not many places you can go any more, if you don't like traffic. But a couple of years ago I managed to find one pretty lonely road. It was the middle of February, and I had persuaded Mary Ann we should do a winter getaway to Labrador City by car. She was unimpressed at first, but when she stopped laughing, she started to worry. "What if we get stuck?". I assured her I would bring along some granola bars so we wouldn't starve. And we could eat snow so we wouldn't die of thirst. I assembled such a large stock of emergency items that there was not enough room in our Toyota Matrix for the both of us. So I had to leave the extra gas container behind, and the full size spare tire. But we had flares, bandaids, all the usual stuff you find in a Canadian Tire emergency kit. Plus an axe, hammer and nails to build a log cabin. And new winter parkas, hats and gloves.

All this preparation was a bit counter productive in making Mary Ann relax. The more stuff I packed, the more stuff she could think of. Just days before the big departure, she decided we had to have some variety in our emergency ration menu. I reminded her that being stranded in the bush for a week was not a scheduled item on our itinerary. Her one final question was "Does the car have a block heater?" I asked myself how does a girl from London Ontario even know what a block heater is? So I said no, but she was still worried. I explained that to use a block heater, you would need an electric outlet close by, and the chance of finding one when we are stuck far from civilization is pretty remote. And if our car would not start in the motel parking lot, we could always go back in to the motel. She still was not completely convinced, but we took off for our trip anyway.

As I predicted, we did not need the Granola bars or the block heater. It's hard to put into words the feeling you get on a really remote stretch of road, but just turn on the car radio and push the seek button and get nothing at all. Is that spooky? On the way up to Labrador, even I was starting to wish for a little more traffic, if just to reassure me the road had not been closed.

Most of the road surface was ice, which reduced our speed to about 70 kph. It wasn't glare ice or black ice like we get in southern Ontario, it was thick, grooved and very cold. Cold ice actually has more traction than the warmer ice we have down south in Canada, because what makes the ice slippery is the water film on top of it. With good winter tires, you actually can drive reasonably well on unsalted and unsanded ice. Also, whenever there was an uphill stretch or a bend in the road, it seemed that a road crew had scattered some sand. They just didn't waste it on the straight bits.

As we got really close to Labrador City, the road became very twisty, and occasionally we would see the imprint of the front of a pickup truck in the snowbank on a curve. The imprints were so perfect that you could actually tell what type of pickup truck went off the road, a Ford, Dodge or Chevy.

The year after, I read an account of a motorcyclist that drove to Labrador in January. I followed his journey with great amazement on the Internet. It reminded me that, no matter how crazy I may be, there is always someone else who can make me appear normal. Click here for the web page.

Click here for a few pictures and videos of our trip.