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.