Day Six – 10/22/07 - Regina rhymes with a female body part

Another day, another Canadian Provincial Capital. Regina is the capital of Saskatchewan, the Canadian equivalent of a gigantic Nebraska. The road to Regina was marked by endless golden prairie as well as endless juvenile jokes about the upcoming city’s pronunciation.

Due to a late start this morning, we arrived in Regina just after the closing of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, home to Canada’s largest mechanical dinosaur. Blast. We vowed to turn over a new leaf of planning and punctuality so as not to miss out on any more national treasures. Moseying over to the capital building, we encountered local kids skating on its front steps, which overlooked the Wascana Waterfowl Pond, boasting over 60 breeds of migratory waterfowl.

Eager to finally get our camp on, we then left the city to check out a campground outside Moose Jaw, a small town west of Regina that Al Capone used to frequent when things got too hot in Chicago. Our AAA camping guide listed “Prairie Oasis Tourist Complex” as one of the few grounds still open this time of year. The establishment we encountered was nestled in the vast wilderness across the highway from a truck dealership. Untamed RVs in their natural habitat dotted the landscape. The woman in the reception office helpfully suggested there was “a patch of grass out back behind the motel” we could pitch our tent on, but that open fires were prohibited. Frightened by this neon trailer park and disappointed in AAA’s taste in wild campgrounds, we said our less-than-fond farewells and continued our search.

Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, another 90 kilometers west, was the next closest site, but was only open for tenting until the end of September. We decided to check it out anyway; anything would be better than the abortion of a campground we’d just witnessed. If worse came to worse, we had already spent one cozy night in the car. What would be another?

Incredibly, the isolated Provincial Park was deserted and completely ours for the conquering when we arrived. We set up camp on a chilly but pretty spot by the lake, surrounded by gentle moonlit brown hills. After inhaling a delicious pasta dinner prepared by Chef Darren, we bundled up, cracked open a few cold ones, and sat around a small beach fire, admiring our Saskatchurroundings.

Our introduction to winter camping was terrific – no seasonal crowds, no entrance fees, just us, the hills, and the peace of the still Canadian night.

Day Five - 10/21/07 - Out of gas in Ontario, Sasquatch-ewan Dreams

Last night we tried driving straight through the night to see if we could bypass Thunder Bay and reach Winnipeg in one go. We encountered two overturned trucks that night, perhaps a harbinger of bad fortunes to come...


With just under half a tank left, we decided to wait until reaching the town of English River to refuel. Unfortunately, English River consisted of three closed buildings and a river.

It was 4am, we were in the middle of Canadian nowhere, and without cell phone reception, so we bundled up in the car, parked at the town restaurant, and went to sleep in our automotive coffin.

I awoke this morning to the red glow of car lights in the surrounding parking lot. I lifted my ski cap and peered out from under a swathe of blankets, backpacks and wires, and saw three running pickup trucks parked outside. I groggily whispered to a snoring Gordon in the drivers seat next to me, “There’re people here. Let’s ask them for gas,” to which he responded that the restaurant wasn’t open yet, and to go back to sleep. Still pained by the crust in my eyes, I followed orders and swam happily back towards unconsciousness.

The next thing I knew, the sun was beating in through the windshield, and all signs of life at the normally bustling three building metropolis of English River had long evaporated. After stumbling out of the car, Gordon and I wandered around, finding only locked doors and “closed for season” signs.

Dammit Gordon. There were trucks! Trucks driven by Canadian mountain men just looking to unload their truckloads of gas cans!

We eventually found our way into an unlocked construction office, where we called CAA to dispatch a truck-driving Canadian mountain man with a gas can. An old-timer from nearby Upsala arrived in a few hours with our complimentary 10 liters of essence, and we were back in business, on our way to Winnipeg.

Gorilla man gave us the thumbs up to go ahead.

Winnipeg, hilariously nicknamed “Winter-peg” by Canadians for its frigid temperatures, is the capital of Manitoba, and once murder capital of Canada.

Arriving in the early evening, we stopped by the state house, expecting locked doors and/or suspicious security guards. We encountered neither. The guard at the front door was quite pleased to receive visitors, making sure that we signed the guest ledger with our full names and hometowns. With nary a hint of a metal detector or an old fashioned American pat down, we were given visitor passes and free reign to explore the building, which was deserted except for a family of Taiwanese tourists at this time of night.

After our foray into the Canadian provincial political scene, we found a sports bar to watch game seven of the ALCS between the Red Sox and the Indians. At this point, Brad announced that he would throw up if he had to sit through another baseball game, and disappeared into the Winnipegian mists in search of a sports-free dinner.

We stayed the night in a local hotel, where we watched the Sox clinch their berth in the World Series.

Day Three - 10/19/07 - Sudbury, Ontario

After leaving Montreal, we puttered through traffic a bit and continued on our way to Sudbury, home of Steve Caruso, an old friend from Becket. The highway through Northern Ontario was characterized by the contrast between the overcast skies and the green and golden (a.k.a. dead) trees. One could see how these landscapes would have inspired the quivering falsetto and famous one-note guitar solos of Ontario’s most famous native son, Neil Young.

After a long day of driving, we met up with Steve at the local Tim Horton’s (a sort of Canadian Dunkin’ Donuts, with decent sandwiches and terrible, terrible donuts). I hopped into Steve’s pick-up truck and Brad, Bryan, and Gordon followed us down the long dirt road to get to the Caruso Family Compound. Steve enlightened me on a number of Canadian matters, most notably the devastation caused by the pine beetle in British Columbia. The pine beetle has always existed, but thanks to Global Warming, the cold no longer kills it off, and it continues to spread south and east, destroying vast stretches of pine forest. It is expected to cross the border into Washington and Oregon in the next few years. One of the side-effects of this phenomenon has been the fall of the timber industry in northern B.C., resulting in an economic depression and all the myriad problems that come with it. We also talked about the significant number of banditos from Ontario who made their livings smuggling alcohol into the U.S. during prohibition.

The Carusos have an impressive spread situated on the banks of one of Ontario’s many lakes. We spent most of our time in the old cabin, but there was also a summer bunkhouse, a sauna, and a massive new building under construction which included a few soon-to-be-bedrooms, two porches, and a common area. Steve had prepared a raging hot sauna for us, so after a few beverages, we headed down to warm up our aching muscles. Steve successfully scared us by hyping up his sauna as one that would make the Becket sauna seem like a refrigerator by comparison. The fire had been going strong for a good four hours by the time we got there. Though a bit reluctant to tempt the heat at first, before long we were sweating out the dirt and nastiness we’d accumulated on our journey thus far, and our muscles appreciated the respite from long hours of amateur contortion in the car.

In a further effort to frighten us, Steve explained that the lake had been created by a half-mile wide meteor made of nickel, and though we could only see its murky surface in the dark, he assured us that it was both thousands of feet deep and lined entirely with jagged rocks. So we stood on the dock for a while trying to imagine what it might be like to see a half-mile wide piece of Martian rock careening toward us and then we finally got in and swam around a bit. It was refreshing to say the least, and it was excellent practice for our proposed polar bear swim in Alaska.

Throughout our time there, there was a guy on the Sudbury college radio station, pouring out his heart to a woman. This went on for hours and included the sappiest of love songs and poetry that he’d written himself when he was fourteen adapted for his current love interest. He was putting himself out there in an exhausting and potentially embarrassing marathon of emotions. At the end of the night, he signed off thinking that his words were falling on deaf ears, we wished we could have called him and let him know that even if he didn’t get the girl of his fancy, he had inadvertently touched five naked guys in a cabin in the woods of Northern Ontario.

Day Two - 10/18/07 - Francophones and Anglophones

We left Berg’s bright and early in the afternoon to start the trip to Canada. Montreal was only about 2 hours from Johnson State College, where we’d spent the night, so we made our way there pretty quickly. The Canadian border was pretty uninteresting. The guard greeted us, “Bonjour, Hello.” And asked for our passports and began checking all of our identification and asking us random questions about what we were carrying. After phrasing one of the most baffling questions I’ve ever had to answer in order to ascertain how much money we had in the bank, he straightened up and suddenly said “I am satisfied.” He said it with the tonality of an internet browser that had just accepted an e-mail password. He tried to follow up with some monotonous ‘jokes’ as we crossed the border into Quebec, but we were already fully aware that he was a robot. I decided to draw a picture for posterity. He looked something like this:



The countryside in southern Quebec is covered in golden fields and farmland. The road was flanked with wheat, pastures and silos for most of the way until we started approaching Montreal. Once we crossed the border, the speed limit changed to 90, and I (who was driving) was close to uttering an audible “Fuck yeah!” until I realized it was in kilometers. The speed limit had actually gone down. It was now about 55 mph. I decided not to say ‘Fuck yeah’ anymore.

As we approached Montreal, the highway was lined on the left side with tall lampposts, and on the right side with gigantic iron structures holding up telephone wires. They looked like massive metal giants standing guard and leading us into the city in the distance. It gave a weird surreal dystopian look to the yellow afternoon.

We finally arrived in Montreal, which was a really nice city. Parts of it felt like old Europe, which was comforting as we began getting irreversibly lost on the sporadically one-way, French-named streets, in search of the apartment which contained Gordon and Bryan’s high school friend Caroline, who went to college in the city.



We found the street finally, after I went the wrong way and almost killed 3 French-Canadians and our entire car. I’ve never driven in a city before, and a foreign city whose first language I know three words of thanks to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, was probably not the best place to start. We found the place and met Caroline and her roommates, who were lovely. Caroline, who is a warm, funny outgoing, person, invited us to stay the night in their living room, as we had nowhere else to sleep that night. We were set to go out to dinner with her friends too, so we settled in and got ready for the night.

In the city of Montreal, Humanity’s constant need to divide itself into irreconcilable, warring factions manifests itself as the Francophones (French speakers) and Anglophones (English speakers). We were warned before we headed to dinner, that the two groups tended to exchange pleasantries and then split into themselves for the rest of the night. Now I would have made a concerted effort if I were even vaguely bilingual in that regard to try to talk to the other side. My friends and I, however, all speak fluent English and a rudimentary amount of Spanish, and only about 3 words of French, so there was really no effort that we could put forth. It’s hard to have a hearty philosophical conversation with “Hello”, “Yes”, “Goodbye” and “I’m the young girl”. Yeah I learned that from that old Muzzy commercial (Je suis la jeune fille!). I can say that, and I don’t even know how to say “No.”

There were about 12 of us in total, and we set out for the restaurant in a large group, walking quickly through the chilly Montreal night. We became split up on the way there for various reasons, some of Caroline’s friends wanted to look in a Halloween store, I needed to go to an ATM to get Canadian dollars, and so on, and by the time we turned up at the restaurant, we (the Anglophones) were the last ones there, and the Francophones had already dominated the left side of the table. We gathered around the right side of the table, and realized that there was no stopping the division of the languages. We were declared the ‘west side’, and had to be given special English menus, because all of the regular ones were in French. Within 15 minutes there was a shocking clarity to the separation. They were gathered on their side of the table, speaking in their gushy, fluid language, dressed nicely in dark clothes, all drinking glasses of red wine. Meanwhile on the Anglo side, we were all dressed in our ragged brown road trip clothes, drinking pints of beer, talking in our sharp, brassy language. There was nothing we could do (They all spoke English as well, so the ball was really in their court), so we just ordered our tapas. I got something called a “lamb cigar” which we thought was hilarious. It turned out to be pretty small, and after 2 Groucho Marx jokes, I realized I wasn’t funny and just ate it.


After dinner, we headed to a bar, and a few people left, so the smaller group was able to talk easier, and the lines between the Francs and Anglos was finally broken. We talked about summer camps, and winter in Canada, and tons of random things, and it became a pretty nice night. Montreal was a really great town, and I just wish we got a chance to see more of it. We stopped at one more bar, and after a hearty pint of Guinness and a discussion of the joys of the completion of the public school system, headed home for bed. We had a longer day of driving the next day, the trip into Ontario to Sudbury would be about 9 hours, so we vowed to get up at 7:30, and went to bed.
We woke up at 11.

Day One - 10/17/07

We're off! Following my return from Chicago at 6:30 this morning, I gave the car to Bryan and passed out. We then packed the Outback, and scooped up Darren and Brad from Pittsfield and Albany, miraculously fitting all of our stuff and two spare tires in the car.
















The cluttered, claustrophobic back seat, in Brad's words, is "like a coffin" but very comfortable for sleeping. We're in northern Vermont with our buddy Dan Berg for the night and off to Montreal tomorrow.

Here's Berg. We're in his unfurnished apartment. He's studying for a tree test.