Canada 500 - Coast to Coast

No Matter Where You Go. . .There You Are.

dan — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 04:21:23 +0000

I’d like to be able to take creative ownership for this entries title but in all honesty I ran across it while inspecting a bathroom graffiti art book that I discovered on a side table at the flat we crashed in Montreal a few weeks ago. It seemed like an appropriate line to go with what we’ve done and to cap off my final update on this site, for now.

Going back a few weeks now; I left Jordan in Halifax with the car to start on whatever is next for him but what seems to be most impressive to people is that we are still great friends despite being stuck in a box for the better part of two months. Having now made it home through a series of last-minute decisions and an inexpensive standby flight, I’ve had a few weeks of pondering what to make of our big adventure. . .

This has been the first year that I’ve taken a summer off. Even in my school days I can’t remember a time when my family took a vacation for more than two weeks and normally the trips were to my grandparents or cousins place. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy those experiences but after spending several months wandering around looking for something I think I may have found it.

Going into this trip I did my best to prepare on the equipment side but to have absolutely no plans or expectations for anything else. In my mind we were going to have a plethora of indiscriminate fun while enjoying the limitless amount of time that we had set aside to make it all happen. The reasons for our trip were so clear at first but as the towns rolled by and we tried different activities it became more about our changing perspective on the world and less about our destinations. It soon became apparent that, although we were able to enjoy many unique experiences, there is always something happening no matter where you are. Even more amazing is that we generally aren’t aware of what is going on around us to any extent outside of our daily routine. It was a rare moment to take a few steps outside of that and to see what we have in our own backyard. Sure we took a fair while trying whatever we could but all-in-all I think what I mostly realized is that we were only scratching the surface of what is available out there.

So what am I going to use this new found knowledge for? Well, among other things, to rant at others what I’ve observed around me:

- Old people are cool and they know stuff

- Computers have their place but they can’t replace the real world that is out there

- People aren’t generally happy, they’re just really busy

- Tourist attractions are for tourists

- When you leave, everyone’s world still continues on

- Change can be good so learn to accept it

- Text messaging is not a viable form of communication except for getting directions

- Jordan is a good musician

- I wouldn’t make a very good sailor

- I think I like people

- It’s really easy to get on television

- Work is a lot of work

- Spend less money, do more

- I dislike “The Forks” at 1 a.m.

- Go on, try something different. . .

Hopefully, with these realizations and many others I will have a more balanced view as to what is happening around me and it will effect my future decisions in a positive way. I guess there is only one way to find out. . .

I also wanted to use my last post to thank everyone that was involved in helping us before, during, and after our travels. We met a lot of exceptional people in the various places we visited and without them this trip really would not have been possible. I never would have thought that my idea from a few years ago might even remotely matter to anyone, yet so many people we talked to could identify with our project. It proved to me that if you set your mind to something and are willing to follow through with the effort you may even surprise yourself as to what you can accomplish! I know that sounds cliche but I’ve learned to take a chance on my dreams even if they don’t follow the standard confines of our society and I can only hope that our experience will prove that to someone else wondering if they should follow through with an idea.

An understanding somewhere / between the turning signal clicks / the shiny food we found with gasoline

jordan — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:51:53 +0000

A long. long time ago, my friend Dan and I set out to cross Canada in a five hundred dollar car, with a five hundred dollar budget. I had a pretty good idea of how it would go. We would spend all kinds of time in tiny towns, getting to know the residents. All of them. We would build robot costumes out of cardboard and have a robo-showdown on the main street of some tiny Saskatchewan town. We would sleep under the stars, on hay bales every night. I would write several albums worth of songs, beautiful, fully articulated ballads inspired by our travels. We would cook beans over an open fire and sip a little of the whiskey we would be sharing with our Hobo friend Gunther. We would sell bad advice on the sidewalk. The wheels would fall off our car and we would devise a way to re-attach them with duct tape. We would try to get on the radio, but they would just laugh at us. I would try to interview John K Samson and Douglas Coupland, but not be able to come even close to getting in touch with them. I would jump in every river I saw. We would only spend a bit of time in the cities. It would never rain, only be sunny, and there would always be puffy cumulonimbus clouds drifting lazily around the heavens. All of my posts on the website would be either stirring or hilarious. All my photos would be carefully composed, and properly color corrected. I would take portraits of people in the town with my 50mm lens, and them staring seriously at a point just behind me, and anyone looking at the photo would instantly know exactly what sort of person they were. I would talk for hours with old farmers. We would walk into the wilderness at some point and spend three days in some silent clearing, reading books in the sun. I would read Jack Kerouac and feel a deep kinship with his characters. There would be so much time!

This was not the trip we took. It rained. They put us on TV a bunch of times. I really did interview John K Samson. We went from major city to major city. My photos were hasty, and not color corrected at all. The program that we used to resize left ugly compression artifacts all over them. My posts just related what happened, with little poetic insight or humour. We didn’t make it into the forest, and we never sat around even a single fire, or slept on a single bale of hay. I wrote no songs, only a couple of lyric-less riffs. And, most of all, the whole trip we rushed, never enough time, a million things to see and do, if only we had the time!

I don’t know how something can be so completely opposite from what I had hoped, and yet still have been so perfect. There was a lot of times that we would be sitting there laughing uncontrollably at some ridiculously amazing thing that we had achieved somehow. At a few points, I felt a dread that the entire rest of the trip would be a struggle, but the struggle never materialized. It got hard, in places, but we were driving across Canada with a five hundred dollar budget, so it was expected, to some extent. Maybe I had gotten myself so prepared for the hardship, so that it just didn’t seem too bad. I don’t think I could have done it for a lot longer, because I probably would have gotten scurvy, but, still. We survived.

So what is to be had from the whole experience? What did I take away, that I can share with those vicariously experiencing our travels?

You don’t always get what you expect.

It’s amazing what you can get by asking.

Strangers often turn out to be people, and interesting ones.

Sleeping in a car always sucks.

It’s easy to live cheap.

It’s easy to waste money.

When driving, music should compliment landscape, as a wine should compliment one’s food.

The world is a really big place, where a lot of things are happening.

It’s pointless to worry.

Dan gets things done.

A little planning goes a long way.

Everything meaningful takes effort.

I could go on. A lot of the people, especially the media people, said that when we were done it would be a good idea to collect our experiences into a book form. At first, I wasn’t entirely sold on the idea. But as I thought about it more, I realized that there were a lot of ways to frame it so that it would actually be pretty interesting. Once I got to Halifax, about a week ago, I started working on a proposal for the idea, and the words and ideas have been pouring out ever since. My sketchbook is full of diagrams and lists of events and people and places and how they interrelate, all in multi-colored glitter pen. It’s partially about our trip, but also about road trips in general, and how in this time of the road trip’s decline, we can look back on several generations of road trips, and how deeply they have become a part of our culture. I want to include a bunch of how-to portions, between the chapters. It should be a good time.

Anyway, it’s been an amazing trip. I can’t wait to see what’s next. I’ve emerged from the trip with a whole new outlook, as if suddenly I can see the amazing possibilities that are open for anyone, if they are willing to seize them. An idea is nothing unless it is actually carried out. Guaranteed, some of the people reading this have ideas that would work, but just can’t find the time or energy to actually put them into action. I’m trying to think of a way to say “just do it” without sounding horribly clichéed. Just look at this trip. It was a good simple idea. But the glory of the thing is that it was accomplished. So write down your idea. Figure out what it would take to make it happen. Plot it all out. And send it to me.

Sleep, oh how I love thee. .

dan — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:13:16 +0000

Alright so our website has been down for a few days but that doesn’t mean we stopped galavanting. In fact we have used the time while the interweb was offline to ferry boat, accomplish our travel goals, and even appeared on national television. Maybe the internet should go down more often as it seems people might get a lot more done?

So let’s backtrack a week. . .

When we first arrived in Halifax was about the time I became aware of what would be fully involved in making it to Newfoundland, the final province on our journey. I had sent an email off to the ferry company, Marine-Atlantic, during days prior but was pessimistic as to whether they would be able to assist. Being painfully ignorant of any necessary process or potential costs we had decided to take it one day at a time like the rest of the trip. The only problem with that is our funds were depleted and I soon realized that making it to “The Rock” was not going to be even remotely easy. Figuring that having made it this far it wasn’t really an option to miss, we reserved a time anyway on the next available boat for Wednesday morning.

After taking a couple of days to explore Halifax I was dismayed to realize it was Tuesday afternoon and I still had not figured out any funding options for Newfoundland. A few people to whom we are extremely thankful had donated through PayPal but the total gathered was barely enough to cover fuel for the trip let alone the boat fares. That was about the time that my phone rang. On the other end was a very friendly public representative for Marine-Atlantic who was really intrigued by our project and had arranged to cover the great majority of our cost to ride their ferry to Argentia Port.

The only thing at this point was that we were about six hours from the terminal and we had made plans for the evening. As always, determined to fit everything possible into twenty-four hours, we decided that it would be a good idea to drive through the night and then sleep once we were on the ferry the next day. Even more convenient was that our mutual friend Erin would be able to meet up with us for our stint in Newfoundland and thus accomplish her goal from the previous year of getting fully across the country. This all seemed like a great plan but after not sleeping through Tuesday night we were faced with a dilemma the following day. . .

We settled in for the seventeen hour ferry ride and met up with Captain Sherman who arranged for a cheerful fellow named Gregory to give us the full tour. It turns out that their boat costs a few dollars more than ours at it’s constant rate of consuming one litre of gas for every second of travel. To top that off it is also one of the longest running ferries in North America so it quickly became apparent how much of a deal we had happened upon through Marine-Atlantic. We seemed to have gotten our fiftieth-wind so we decided to stay awake for the rest of the day and enjoy

the calming view provided by the open seas. Even after all of the sleep adversity we have endured throughout the trip, I still could not devise a way to sleep while sitting up in a chair and there were no cabins available due to our late booking. Following what seemed like an eternity came the announcement that we had arrived at the Argentia Port, it was now Thursday morning and my associate travel companions didn’t seem to have faired much better that me with the rest issue.

Then again, we had made it! We were in Newfoundland and less than two hours away from our desired destination of St. John’s. To add to the excitement we had been invited to have an interview on “Canada AM” that morning and so off to the NTV studio we went, three days sleep deprived and all! That is the only disclaimer I should claim before you watch the resulting video below as it seems to have gone alright anyway. . .

Lindsey and Amy along with everyone else we met at the NTV studio were incredibly friendly and they even arranged for us to get a free lunch at Ches’s along with a couple of Canada AM mugs to commemorate the occasion. They had us do an interview for the evening news and then we worked our way over to the CBC station to record a spot on Radio One for “Sounds Like Canada” with Steve Burgess. It seemed like all of a sudden people were interested in our project so we took the five minutes of fame and just tried to stay awake.

By the time the media barrage had ended it was well into Thursday afternoon so we decided to take in as much of St. John’s as we could muster energy for. Signal Hill was an obvious tourist destination so we made our way over to the base and stopped by the historic Quidi Vidi area on the way up. I don’t think words can quite explain how beautiful it was to be there in person and the delirious state we were in as we contemplated our adventure only eccentuated the sense of accomplishment. After a solid five hours of hiking trails and crawling around massive seaside rocks we decided it was time to find a place to sleep before one of us fell into the ocean due to pursuing an alternate-reality phantasmagoria. Thankfully we met up with some great people named Lloyd and Linda that offered to have us stay with them during our time there. So off to dreamworld we went eager to continue on with our Newfoundland diversion the following day.

I think my sleep that night was the deepest sleep of my life. . .

We had arranged to return to NTV the following day to record for another national spot on “Good Morning Canada” that I believe will be on this coming weekend. It felt liked the right time to audition for a job as news anchors but alas I think we may be better off as road trippers, you can decide. . .

Once our television stint was done our travel collective decided that we should see as much of St. John’s that afternoon since we would have to leave the following day to return to Nova Scotia.

Cape Spear seemed like the definite choice as it is not only the home of a lighthouse, something for which I hold intrinsic fondness, but it is also the eastern most point of North America. We spent a few hours there and I tore my pants fairly well on a big rock at the edge of the ocean. Maybe they will become famous and then I can auction of the authentically eastern-most ripped pants to pay for the ticket home?

One of the things it seems everyone we encountered in the Maritimes told us to do was to get “screeched in” if we made it to Newfoundland. This involves passing a set of cultural criterion decided at some point by the general populous of Newfies. Essentially you eat a piece of Newfoundland steak (bologna), kiss a cod fish, and then drink a shot of rather gut-wrenching rum referred to as “screech.” This is all followed by reciting a line that is globally recognized as validating your being an honorary citizen. Since it was our last night we made our way down to the George Street festival and found our way into the first place we were referred to for the event.

I must admit I quite like the idea of each province having a unique right of passage but after waiting for almost two hours the process didn’t quite live up to all the hype. Besides we were still exhausted and afterwards it took all we could just to get back to our increasingly comfortable beds.

The following morning brought us to the inevitable end of our time in Newfoundland. Before making our way south we availed ourselves of a free visit to The Rooms museum, gallery, and archives thanks to Donna and her daughter Danielle, who we had met the day prior. Since Shamus O’Regan from Canada AM had personally recommended “The Captains Table” restaurant for fish n’ chips, we felt it would be a fitting way to end the expedition on the way back to the ferry terminal. The voyage back was filled with a strong sense of satisfaction accompanied by anticipation for what will come next in our lives.

On returning we were able to fit in an amazing detour onto the Cabot Trail. I don’t think “The Brampton Rose” was the biggest fan but nonetheless it was more than worthwhile. We then made our way back to Halifax and have spent the past three days relaxing with a few of our now close friends here. I spent last night in a unimaginably wonderful lighthouse thanks to the hospitality of a local couple, Jim and Tara.

Once I have a few days to ponder everything I’m sure I’ll be able to make sense of all the copious thoughts that are gushing through my mind at the moment. Either way it has been the ride of a lifetime getting this far and it is still sinking in that we actually made it!

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