RETURNING HOME

I'm home! I did the 4,500-kilometer trip in three days--a record. The first night took me to the Lake Superior area of Ontario with lots of tiny, dingy motels. I could have stopped at one, but I pulled over at a car lot in Nipigon. (If I'm sleeping in the car, car lots are great because I don't stand out when I'm surrounded by other vehicles.) Well, it was very cold so I got back on the road after two hours and drove through the night, remaining vigilant for moose and other wildlife. (“Moose on the Loose” at “Moose at Night” signs pop up every five minutes on the route and I drove under the speed limit, ready to brake or swerve should a critter appear.)

For the second night, I was in the middle of Saskatchewan and stopped in three towns, looking for a cheap motel. The first town had the most disgusting looking hotel I've ever seen--worse than The Patricia on Hastings in Vancouver’s skid row area, a hotel an L.A. travel agent unwittingly booked me into during my first visit to the city. There was no room at the inn at the next two stops. I parked in an auto body lot, spitting distance from an incredibly active nighttime railroad track, and tossed and turned from 9 p.m. until 5 a.m. when my dog Lincoln decided it was time to throw up. (I learned from the trip to the cottage and got him out of the car on time.) At some point in my "sleep", I mysteriously managed to break a middle toe which swelled up. Plenty awake, I washed my hair using a water bottle and hit the road again.

That's when I realized I had a shot of making it home in a three-day marathon. I was a crazed driver! Construction work in Calgary--at both ends!--and around Banff put me on edge--the dogs might say over the edge--and getting stuck behind camper vehicles for long stretches through the Rockies made matters worse. I had given myself a couple of hours leeway to catch the final ferry home (9:15), but that time seemed to be ticking away.

Thank goodness for the Coquihalla Highway which runs for nearly two hundred kilometers between Kamloops and Hope, B.C.! It is like a raceway. Cars whizzed past me when I was doing 130 (or more). Bring on more of our own Autobahns!

Despite my fretting, I realized I had a (remote) shot of making the 7:25 sailing. Drawing on my newly acquired race driver experience, I zigzagged through traffic as I neared Vancouver and got to the terminal three minutes before the cutoff. What a bonus to arrive home a day early!

I am feeling surprisingly alert today and the dogs are relieved to be home, reacquainting themselves with their favorite lounging spots. My butt feels bruised from such long periods of sitting and I have officially ruled out truck driver as my next career. Now I have nothing left to fall back on if I can’t make it as a writer. I have no choice but to write!

THE LENGTHS TO WHICH I’LL GO TO FIND A NEW WRITING SPOT

From August 11, 2009--Posted belatedly due to lack of Internet access at the cottage

I have successfully completed my four-day, 4,600 kilometer road trip from my home in British Columbia to the family cottage on the Ottawa River in Ontario. There were times during the trip that I questioned the point in making the journey.

One of those key moments had to be at 5 a.m. during the second night’s sleep while in an auto body shop parking lot in Winnipeg. I awakened to the familiar sound of my dog Lincoln gagging. With my legs half stretched out in the trunk of the vehicle, sandwiched between several bags of specialized dog food and loose shoes buffering contact with a suitcase and tennis gear, I could not move fast enough to prevent the inevitable.

I suppose I should be relieved that Lincoln’s vomit was more of a paste than a batter, but the smell—a mix of fermented strawberry and bile-coated doggy dinner negated any sort of consolation. And I’m not going near strawberry jam in the next decade. Lincoln managed to hit my pillow, sleeping bag, a stack of clean clothes, extra bedding, the car seat and the clothes I was wearing. I did my best to remove whatever I could spot with my glove compartment stash of Tim Horton’s napkins and generous dabs of bottled water, but the stench never went away during my final two days of living in the car. Maybe that was part of my motivation to get to the cottage in record time—four days, not five.

I could only listen to my greatest hits collection of Simply Red so many times, no matter how much I enjoyed reconnecting with forgotten gems. And, given that much of the trip traversed vast stretches of farmland and forest, clear radio stations were fleeting. It didn’t help that Christian and country radio—and one odd Spanish station—carried the strongest signals.

I had a lot of time for thinking. The first day across B.C. was void of any writing ideas. I was still getting oriented to travel mode—and stewing over a speeding ticket awarded after passing a truck that I’d been stuck behind for twenty minutes.

Fortunately, much of the first chapter of a children’s novel I’d been thinking about came to me once I settled for the night in the parking lot of a car dealership in Fort Macleod, Alberta. (When sleeping in my car, I try to pick businesses with cars in the lot. That way, my car doesn’t stand out so much—bike hanging off trunk rack notwithstanding—and then I don’t have to worry about a police officer banging on my window in the middle of the night, telling me to move my loitering butt along.)

Without an electrical outlet for my laptop and with my notepads buried in a backpack somehow hidden as a result of an in-transit avalanche that occurred early on due to my faulty packing technique, I grabbed my long unused mini recorder and rambled on with a flood of ideas to begin the novel. And so began a series of dictated writing flourishes during the remainder of the trip. Random travel thoughts are interspersed throughout the tapes: something about faux roadkill (burned out tires); a rant about Thunder Bay’s hidden gas stations; a musing about a small town named Head, Clara and Maria. (Yes, that’s one town name.)

Today I get to listen to the tapes and turn the recordings to written text. No doubt, there will be a fair amount of drivel in my spontaneous notes. I’ll attribute any such passages to road fatigue (and that lingering berry-scented vomit), but I am hoping there will be some keepers in the mix and fodder for further writing.

This is it. It took four days of driving and three nights of sleeping in the car, but I have made it to the cottage, my abode for the next two months. I am hoping the place will inspire a flurry of writing activity. And I’m blocking all thoughts about the return trip. Time to live in the moment!