Well, they say to be careful what you wish for.
The day started out earlier than I was expecting: I was wide awake at 6:30am, and seeing as how I was nearly 3000 miles from home, I felt like just getting on with things. So much for plans for Maid of the Mist or the Niagara wine region; I just couldn’t bear sitting around for hours waiting for that stuff to open. Leaving at 7:00am also meant I could probably catch the 1:50pm Tobermory to South Baymouth ferry rather than the 6:10pm that I had been planning on.
So I headed right out of Niagara Falls, north towards Toronto, knowing that I’d turn west before getting too close to the big city. I had looked on a map and it looked like I’d even avoid Toronto suburb traffic, but then I blindly followed the GPS unit’s directions, which snared me in traffic by heading too far north (foreshadowing alert!).
I got to Tobermary with about 30 minutes to spare, and just had time to park in the loading area and grab a few pictures of the arriving ferry before it was time to load. The Chi-Cheemaun is a cool vehicle / passenger ferry, with two decks worth of cars, a large central space for RV’s, and two decks for passengers. The trip was about an hour and a half, the food was edible, and the views were great.
Upon disembarking I set the GPS unit to take me to Thunder Bay (what a name!) and started driving. Quick music review: you know how awful the mere idea of “Operation Mindcrime 2″ sounds? Well, the reality is worse. This CD is everything that was ever trite, embarrassing, and cheesy about Queensryche, all rolled up into one seemingly endless CD. It goes on and on, and gets worse and worse. Ouch. Ugh. Don’t do it.
After several hours, mostly spent listening to the most excellent audiobook version of Making Money, I noticed that I was heading inland when I had expected to just hug the shore of Lake Superior. Hmmf. A few minutes of fiddling with the GPS and it showed that it had me taking a shortcut that trimmed a corner off of the shoreline route. Fair enough, I think, there’s still plenty of shore on my route.
Note to Garmin: the Nuvi is a perfectly respectable GPS unit, but it desperately needs to have a scale indicator. After an hour or so of further driving and seeing that my little icon hadn’t moved very far, I found that the little shortcut was about 200 miles. It was still shorter than the other way, but it was inland, on a more desolate road, with no gas stations, and I only had a quarter tank (plus the reserve tank, which is really and truly a separate tank on the H1).
An hour or so later, winding up mountain roads, there was a pretty spectacular sunset. Amazing colors, great clouds, just really something special. My attention was only partly distracted by being down to under 1/8 of a tank and still not having seen a gas station.
It was getting to be time decide whether or not to turn around; I knew the reserve tank had enough to get me back to the main route. But ugh, who wants to go 50 miles backwards? Besides, there had to be a gas station on this road eventually, right? I mean, how far can people drive without gas? So I kept going.
Sunset finished, and it got dark. And cold. And started raining. The road stayed twisty, the GPS unit continued to claim that the closest gas was behind me (60 miles, 70 miles….), and the gas guage kept plumbing new depths of E, while I had to go slower as the road got twistier wetter.
And that’s when it started snowing. Have I mentioned that the heater in the truck doesn’t work? Well, it doesn’t. Suddenly, with the main tank on E, with the GPS unit saying the nearest gas was 80 miles behind me (approx reserve tank capacity: 80 miles), driving through a decent snowstorm, starting to find slick icy bits on the road, in the dark, with no cell phone coverage and no heat, on a deserted road on which I hadn’t seen another car on in a long long time… I started having some second thoughts. Maybe I really should go back?
I mean, I wanted adventure, but maybe spending the night in the back of the truck wearing every article of clothing in my suitcase and hoping for eventual rescue was not really the kind of adventure I wanted. I knew I’d live, of course, but what a crappy way to spend a night and then the next day. Sorry for the lack of
And then, when it looked hopeless, I passed a tiny gas station / restaurant that had an open sign. It was a guy’s house, and he was all locked up, and he had gasoline but not diesel… but he knew a closer town with a gas station than the GPS did. And only 50km (30 miles) away, well within reserve tank range. Hello, Chapleau, my new favorite town.
So here I am, in exciting Chapleau, in a hotel room with no hot water, in a town with no cell coverage, where the only restaurant that was open at 10pm was barely edible, and I’m pretty thrilled with the luxury of it all. The fact that I have my room heated to about 90F has me positively euphoric.
Lessons learned: Double check the route and scale of what the GPS unit is suggesting. Think twice about driving a truck with no heat into the snow. Make sure the tank is full before taking a 200 mile detour off the main route. If a CD sounds like a terrible idea, it probably is.
Leave a Reply