journey east: day 17

Day 17 begins.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum.

Not everything noted in my journey east journal is making it to these pages. I made brief notes along the way on roadside observations, transcripts from audio notes, and points I thought I would follow up on, but didn't. I could write them here verbatim, but they wouldn't always make sense. Take this for example:

Milestone math problems. Distance marked to Thunder Bay varied. Finish clock from 722km at Manitoba border sign and 705km at Kenora. arrived at 712km.

Milestones indicating the distance to a notable destination didn't always add up. In this case, when I crossed the Manitoba/Ontario border, the sign said it was 722km to Thunder Bay. I did some quick math with my odometer to see what the mileage would be when I got there. But as I travelled closer to Thunder Bay, and did more math as I passed more signs telling me the distance to the city, my end mileage calculated varied by 17 km. It struck me that in this day and age of gps navigation and satellite mapping that the highway department couldn't get the math right.

So what? Well, that's sort of my point. Some of the notes I made are too vague to post and hope the reader will get anything out of them, and once explained, at length, aren't really that interesting.

On the other hand, there are also notes that though they are as cryptic in meaning as the first example, may very well bear expanding on. Like this one:

Great insect massacre. Evidence smeared across the front of the car.

Picture a swarm of large, crusty, flying things impacting the front of the car at 100 km/h. Now imagine the same scenario piloting a motorcycle. I passed through such a swarm just as I was passing a clutch of motorcycles and I felt so sorry for the poor bastards riding next to me. Better still, listen to what I had to say on the subject: bugs and buzzards.

Having said all this, there is a point I was going to make, above and beyond just pointing to the little bits I've left out of my postings and why they've been left behind. A funny thing happened on the way to Fredericton. Actually, lots of funny things happened and there were interesting things, and arresting things, and poignant things. They were the kind of things that made me stop and ponder my place in the world. If I wrote about all those things I'd be writing all day, and you, the reader, wouldn't have time for it all. So I'll leave them for another day, another forum, and when I can, when I feel it just can't wait, I'll pop one into these writings. Oh, and I have more recordings where the bugs and buzzards came from.


Heading back along the Sleeping Giant the fog set in for good. Not far from here I had my first bear sighting since B.C.

June 18, 2006

847 kilometres travelled today. The high temperature was 24c and the low was 11c.
It was a rather uneventful day of travel today. I made some audio notes along the way, but I'm not sure I want to go to the car to get my voice recorder. Lazy. The mosquitoes are pretty nasty too.

I'm tired tonight. It was another long day of driving and I'm spent. Fuck it, I'll go get the recorder. But first, today's playlist: Bruce Springsteen, The River disk one; Phil Collins, Face Value; James Blunt, Back to Bedlam; Jack Johnson, In Between Dreams; Crash Test Dummies, Give Yourself a Hand; Gordon Lightfoot, Greatest Hits; Murray McLaughlin, Gulliver's Taxi; Collective Soul, Disciplined Breakdown.

The giant Canada Goose at Wawa, Ontario. How can you not stop to take a photo?

I'm not sure when it happened, though I think it was when I left Lethbridge, I stopped listening to a cd more than once. I Had at least 70 or 80 cds with me and figured it would be a great opportunity to listen to them all. So I grabbed one of the three cases I had, started at the front, and worked my way back. No selection. No choice. Whatever was next in line got played. That's where the daily playlist fits in. It made for some interesting driving too. And serendipitous. While travelling the coast of Lake Superior near where the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in 1975 Gordon Lightfoot's ode to the wreck cycled through on the playlist. The fog was thick and the coincidence left me with chills.

notes that might make sense:

-Ridiculously thick fog. Crawling along at 80 km/h looking for coffee on a Sunday morning in the middle of no where: "I hope there's someplace that has coffee. There better be ..." I haven't experienced sustained fog like this since I left the maritimes. Another reminder of where I'm heading.
-At a store with a moose painted on its side, in the parking lot, a replica of a natural stone spire which stands 25km back the way I've come. I didn't stop to see the real thing. Now I'm reduced to admiring, and I use that term loosely, a replica over reality. I'm so 21st century.
-I passed three Amish-looking men riding two horse-drawn carriages along the Trans Canada Highway. Odd.