And that concludes the Buffalo to Seattle trip. Over the next week or two, I’ll post some reviews of auidobooks and new music that I listened to on this trip. The next adventure that I’m hoping to blog will be when I drive in the Baja 1000, starting around November 10th.

10:00am – Left Winnipeg
12:00pm – Drove through Riding Mountain National Park, again
1:00pm – Got to Dauphin
2:00pm – Truck repairs complete, truck (mostly) cleaned of oil residue
2:30pm – Left Dauphin
3:00pm – Drove through Riding Mountain National Park. Again.
2:00am – Got to Lethbridge, Alberta. I sleep now.

Ordinarily this kind of thing would be a real bummer. But seeing as how it happened in the first town of reasonable size that I’ve stopped in, it feels almost like good luck. Having a Chevy service department right across the street, when I’ve spend the past four days hundreds of miles from the closest one? It’s enough to make an expensive and frustrating day feel like a blessing.

Another great day. Within a couple of hours of leaving Thunder Bay, I drove through typical lake lowlands, some nice marsh complete with those archetypical (/ɑrtʃtɪpɪkəl/) marsh plants, marsh verging on forest, pure forest, forest with a mix of of evergreen and deciduous (naked, this time of year) trees, rocky areas, lakeside forests, and probably several other permutations of lake, marsh, forest, and rocks that I’ve neglected. All really, really beautiful. Many of them utterly spectacular.

And then, nearing Winnipeg, I was faced with the choice: stay on the main highway and go through a big city, or continue on backroads that would take somewhat longer. But I’ve been really enjoying the Canadian backroads, those couple of hours on Friday when I was concerned about running out of gas and freezing to death in the snow notwithstanding. And one big highway through a big city is exactly like another, and I’ve seen enough of those.

So it was the backroads again, this time heading up through Whitemouth (town motto: “Beware the zebra mussel”), Whiteshell (town motto: “There is no actual town here”), and Gimli (town motto: “Aye, Legolas”). Wonderful, scenic two lane roads that were neither too twisty nor too straight. They weren’t in great repair either, but once I settled down and stopped picking my way around the uneven bits the way I would in the Lotus, the H1 didn’t even notice the bumps.

I nearly filled up my camera’s memory card with pictures of scenic roads, scenic lakes, scenic trees, and scenic skies. But a the end of the day, one beautiful country road with artful foliage and a tranquil pond reflecting gorgeous clouds looks much like another, so I’m only uploading the canonical examples. These aren’t “this was a beautiful spot” pictures. These are “here are a few examples of what I saw for six hours straight” pictures.

After another beautiful sunset (it must be a law up here), I found myself still a couple of hours out of the next city with hotels, gas stations and all that stuff. The night drive was also beautiful, with no moon and the kind of stars that you only see in the country. However, it is somewhat nerveracking to try to enjoy stars while barreling along at 100kph (62mph) in a 3275kg (7200lb) truck, especially with all of those bright yellow “beware of moose in road (especially at night)” warning signs.

Entertainment notes: Plato & a Platypus was ok but not great; some good jokes, but only middling writing quality, and a fairly poor vocal performance on the audiobook. Zoon is still the ultimate goth metal album 10 years later. And I am constantly impressed with Dreamweb. It’s just so cool sonically, and has a great approach to narrative.

Today was a much, much better day than yesterday. Overnight, I received email from Vinny, the guy who I bought the H1 from. He had a tip on where to look for the heater problem, and with that help I was able to get the auxiliary heater going. The aux heater is basically a second heater core and blower between the front and back seats. And, all by itself, it is plenty capable of making the cabin very toasty in short order. Which is very nice if, say, you’re looking at driving a couple of hundred miles in the snow and the main heater is flat out refusing to work.

With a functional heater, a full tank of gas, a good night’s sleep, and a couple of fun audiobooks (the end of Making Money, the beginning of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar), the drive from Chapleau to Thunder Bay was easy and relaxing. The first couple of hours, there was decent snow on the side of the road, and the gradual transition to lake country was really pretty to watch. Driving the H1 is starting to feel normal, and I’m getting used to parking the thing.

Highlights along the way included a closed ski slope at Marathon (the road goes by the top of the slope, and there’s a lift to get you back up), and a giant goose apparently serving to promote… I’m not sure what. I only noticed the goose. There was also the brief time when the speedometer just stopped working, but I’m going to pretend that that didn’t happen. It did fix itself, after all, which really is the same thing as not-happening in the cosmic sense.

I arrived in the so-far-misnamed Thunder Bay around 5pm. Misnamed because there has been a total lack of thunder so far. There is, however, a bay. And a very, very big bay it is. Lake Superior is pretty darned gigantic; from the shore here, it looks like an ocean. Minus the waves, of course. Someone should really come up with an adjective to indicate that these central North American lakes are not at all your run-of-the-mill oversized ponds.

Unfortunately for the aesthete, Thunder Bay is a working port town, so most of the waterfront is taken up by the port, railroads, warehouses, and so on. My hotel room is on the 4th floor and has a great view; from street level, though, there’s not much to be seen.

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.

So I flew out to Buffalo to pick up a 1996 Hummer H1. Yes, the real thing, before they got bought by GM and turned into Suburbans with Arnold-inspired bodywork. The thing is a beast, in the best possible sense. It weights four times more than the Lotus. And it drives like it weighs four times more. People do not pull out in front of you.

Here are the photos from Buffalo to Seattle: Day One. And, since I know that future generations will be desperate for more details of this mini-adventure, here’s the story so far:

10:30am – Met Vinny, test drove the H1, found it to be great fun. Resisted urge to run over pedestrians and curbs. Signed papers, that sort of thing.

11:30am – Headed out of Buffalo, north towards Canada. Realized that just aiming in the general direction of home might be wildly inefficient, and might miss some worthy sights and stops. Got a little confused about what general direction Canada lay in. If I-90 West has a right angle turn to the right and then I-290 veers off perpindicular to the left of that, is that towards Canada or Ohio?

12:00pm – Used Google maps to write pen-and-paper directions to find nearest Circuit City

12:15pm – Bought Garmin nuvi 350 GPS unit at Circuit City. Found out which way Canada is with near certainty.

12:25pm – Confirmed that the H1’s stereo has no aux in or iPod connection. 3000 miles with two audiobooks on CD sounds unpleasant. Not sure if they have stores in Canada. Used new GPS unit to find nearest Best Buy (two blocks from Circuit City, of course).

12:30pm – Bought new Alipne head unit and powered subwoofer. Mark at Best Buy was nice, said he’d have it installed in two hours or so. Was itching to get on the road, but not without tunes and iPhone-based audiobooks. Went shopping, bought books, bought CDs.

2:45pm – Stereo install done. Sounds good. Program GPS unit to take me to Canada, wondering what they’ll think of the truck with a lien on it, registered to someone else.

2:47pm – Aaaaaaargh. Goddamned new Alpine head unit can’t shuffle songs from an iPod playlist. It can shuffle songs from a single album, or all songs on the device. iPhone has both audiobooks and music, so shuffle means getting random chapters of books I haven’t read yet mixed in with my music. Somewhat annoying. I don’t know who Franklin is yet, but I’m sorry he’s having such a hard time.

3:15pm – Got to Canadian border. Some traffic, maybe a 30 minute wait to cross. Fought with Alpine head unit more. Its iPod “support” is atrocious. Its UI is anti-dis-counterintuitive. What have I bought? 3000 miles with this thing? I may have to kill it.

3:45pm -Got to border agent. He looks at my Washington driver’s license. Asks where I’m going: Seattle. Asks if I’ve got alcohol: no. Asks if I’ve got firearms: no. Asks what I am carrying: luggage. Asks if my luggage: resist urge for smart-ass comment, stick to “no.” Asks how long I’ll be in Canada: 5 days? 10 days? And that’s it. They’ve let me into the country (more than Pace can say).

4:15pm – Driving towards Niagara Falls, Ontario. See sign for helicopter tours. Hey, that sounds like fun.

4:30pm – Arrive at helicopter tour place. $110. Sounds reasonable, I’m in.

4:45pm – Wheee, this is fun. Gorgeous views. Terrified English tourists flying with me. Niagara Falls is actually really, really pretty. At least from 2000 feet.

5:05pm – Back at the heliport. Um. Yes, that was fun. Yes, that was a great view. But $110 for a 20 minute helicopter ride? About three times what I’m used to paying in Hawaii? Ouch. I’m in the wrong business.

5:30pm – Arrive at Hilton Niagara Falls. Woohoo, they were smart and built it with all rooms on the falls side, and just a hallway on the inland side.

5:35pm – Got a great room on the falls side. On the 9th floor. With only a 12 floor building between me and the falls. Oh well. It does have a whirlpool tub, at least.

6:00pm – At least the hotel bar, on the 34th floor, has a good view. The falls really are pretty, Mark Twain notwithstanding. Bartender was confused about the relationships and differences between ales, pale ales, and India pale ales. For shame.

6:30pm – Dinner at Watermark, on the 33rd foor. Perfectly respectable, at least the server was knowledgeable about local wine and had a sense of humor. Weird Caesar salad (bacon?!), good prime rib with good horseradish, somewhat dry chocolate cake. Decent, but nothing special.

Highlight: The new toy, of course.

Lowlight: The Caesar salad at Watermark, in the Hilton Niagara Falls. Yes, bacon and anchovies are both salty. That does not mean you should substitute them willy-nilly.