The graceful end of the Trans-Canada Highway

By Mark Richardson - Thursday, August 9, 2012 at 1:56 PM - 0 Comments

Victoria, British Columbia – Day 57

Trans-Canada distance: 7,370 km

Trans-Canada adjusted distance (including ferries): 7,605 km

Actual distance driven: 15,245 km

NOW: (Victoria) Tristan and I drove the final hour right through to the very end of the highway this morning – or is that the very beginning?

At Mile 0 in Victoria

The sign says “Mile 0” and as journalist Walter Stewart wrote in 1965, “the Trans-Canada Highway (is) the world’s only national roadway that has two beginnings and no end. You start from Mile 0 on Water Street in downtown St. John’s, Newfoundland, drive 7,714 kilometres, and finish up in Beacon Hill in downtown Victoria, where the sign reads – guess what? – Mile 0. Neither city wanted to be at the tail of the procession, so we made a road with two heads and no foot. Very Canadian, very sensible.”

That was close to 50 years ago and much has changed since. The road no longer starts in Newfoundland in downtown St. John’s – as I discovered on the first day of this journey, it starts at the dump – and the distance is now more than a hundred kilometres less, including the salt-water distance covered by the ferries that connect Newfoundland and Vancouver Island to the mainland.

Also at Mile 0

While the eastern end of the highway is purely practical, because Newfoundlanders generally consider it to be the road across their province rather than the road across Canada, the B.C. terminus is still graceful and beautiful, once it’s finished pressing through Victoria’s congested downtown. The Trans-Canada ends at Beacon Hill Park and today there was a young deer grazing under the trees near the sign. It seemed a world away from the moose I was warned about constantly back East.

It’s also no longer a challenge to drive; anyone with a licence and a vehicle can do it. Rush along and it can be covered in a week, though those are long days filled with driving and not much fun. But slow it down and everything changes – the highway becomes a necklace across the country, linking the Canadian provinces and their people to each other in a tangible, physical, highly visible way. There’s still a romance to be found on the road if you want to look for it: it’s right there beneath your feet, under your tires, waiting to show you Canada.

THEN: (Victoria) The Malahat Highway, which goes over the mountain just north of Victoria, was completed in 1912.

Wilby and Haney in Victoria

Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney drove it to arrive at the provincial capital on Oct. 18 that year, 53 days after leaving Halifax, and I’m sure the end could not come too soon for the pair. They’d grown to despise each other. For an account of the journey, take a look at my story in Maclean’s magazine here.

They went straight to the provincial capital building beside the harbour to deliver various pieces of mail to the mayor that dignitaries had given them along the way, and then to the coast to pour their remaining bottle of Atlantic water into the Pacific. That night, as in Vancouver, they were feted as heroes – or at least Wilby was. Dinner was at the Pacific Club and Albert Todd – of the Todd Medal – spoke, then the deputy minister of public works, and then Wilby.

In his book A Motor Tour Through Canada, Wilby says that “It was after the car had been stripped of the appurtenances of travel – after the speeches of the banquet at the Pacific Club – that I strolled out under the stars to the Douglas obelisk in the Parliament Grounds… Sir James Douglas, who had pre-visioned the day when vehicles would make the crossing of the Canadas to the Pacific! Linking east with west – a trail from Hope to the Kootenay across the Rockies, meeting at Edmonton a similar road built westward from the Atlantic – a great highway should cross the continent by which emigrants from the maritime provinces might have easy access to British Columbia. As in the days of Sir James Douglas, so now Canada needs the Transcontinental Highway for the unification of her peoples.”

It was not that simple, though. Wilby and Haney left separately to return east on separate trains and never spoke to each other again. Indeed, Haney rarely spoke of the adventure at all. And it would take another 50 years before the Trans-Canada Highway would be declared open, and another decade after that before it could really be considered finished.

And it’s still not finished, though it is complete. It will never be truly finished, because it’s improved, widened, straightened, smoothed over with every year that passes. In another hundred years, who knows what the Trans-Canada will look like, or what route it will take? But it will be there, linking the provinces, lending its iconic route to the country, never to be taken away.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Victoria) Louise Rouseau lives at Mile 0 House, right opposite the famous sign in Beacon Hill Park. Her cousin owns the building and she visited in 1961 on her honeymoon, the year before the TCH was opened officially. Is there anything different about living right at the end of the Trans-Canada Highway?

Louise Rousseau

“Oh yes,” she says, “there most definitely is. You see a lot of stuff here – some sad, some good. One guy drove off the end of the road, down the cliff. He was trying to kill himself. It didn’t work though and he walked back up on the steps.

“People come to see the Terry Fox statue. Many tour buses stop here, but I don’t know if they know that it’s the end of the Trans-Canada. I tell them if they ask. Sometimes, when I’m out with my grand-daughter, we get swarmed by a tour bus. We get our photo taken – a lot.”

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Victoria) Today will be my last and final day of blogging and I am happy about it because I will no longer have to stay up late writing it. Now I can stay up late watching TV.

Afternoon tea at The Empress

We had tea at The Empress hotel today and everything in there was so fancy. I was so afraid to do something wrong, but I got through it without doing anything wrong, I think.

So as I said earlier this is my last day of blogging, so I would like to wish all of the people who read my blog a farewell. Goodbye to all.

Wanting to be at the end of the Trans-Canada

By Mark Richardson - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

Duncan, British Columbia – Day 56

Trans-Canada distance: 7,250 km

Actual distance driven: 15,144 km

NOW: (Duncan) The town of Tofino would have liked me to drive on west from Port Alberni to reach the end of the Trans-Canada. It claims to be the Pacific terminus of the highway, but this is just a claim – it’s not, despite the sign down by the wharf that declares it as such.

The current Tofino sign

It’s an extra 125 km west to Tofino, but it’s slow going: Hwy. 4 is a narrow two-lane highway that twists and turns in places between rocky outcrops, and it doesn’t allow for higher speed. Even so, the town lobbied back in the 1930s and ’40s to be the end of the Trans-Canada, and there are those who say that the municipality was double-crossed by politicians in Victoria. The sign went up back then and it’s not about to be taken down.

Local resident Ken Gibson has been talking to the media about this. You can read the Canadian Press story here, or listen to his explanation to the CBC here.

But as even he accepts, there’s nothing official about the town’s declaration. Just because it’s the farthest west point on southern Vancouver Island and opens onto the Pacific Ocean is not enough to qualify it as the TCH’s endpoint. In fact, the Trans-Canada already reaches farther west than Tofino: The Yellowhead Highway, Route 16, which splits away from Route 1 in Manitoba west of Winnipeg and passes through Edmonton, is officially considered part of the Trans-Canada Highway. It ends at Prince Rupert, north of Vancouver Island and much farther west.

THEN: (Port Alberni) I poked around the town’s museum this morning and discovered there may have been more to the story of the 1912 gathering than I knew about yesterday.

The original highway sign in 1912

The neighbouring towns of Alberni and Port Alberni were fierce rivals. When the Canadian Pacific Railroad company decided in 1907 to build its station in the newer community of Port Alberni, the Alberni residents figured that, to make up for losing the railway, they would pitch for the new highway.

So which came first: the town of Alberni approaching the motoring organizations, or the motorists suggesting the highway to the town? Modern historical accounts favour the latter, but it seems more likely it was the former.

Either way, it’s no big deal, except that it may be that the first germ of the idea for a Trans-Canada Highway came about from the petty jealousy of two small chambers of commerce, far away from any corridors of power.

I’ll be writing a book later this year about the Trans-Canada Highway that will include far more research, detail and stories than this daily blog has permitted. I’ll see if I can track down the facts in Victoria this week, so that the record can finally be set straight.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Coombs) Tourists know the “Goats on the Roof” country market as just that – a very popular place to stop that just happens to have goats grazing on its roof. It’s a restaurant and a well-stocked store full of gourmet foods and bizarre souvenirs, and several other stores for surf equipment and jewellery and all things popular with West-Coast visitors.

Goats, on the roof

But how did the goats get there in the first place?

“It’s a building that’s built in the Norwegian style with grass on the roof – our heritage here lends itself to that – and it’s not uncommon there, in Norway, for goats to graze on the roof,” says manager Arthur Urie.

“In 1971 or ’72, the fall fair literally ran out of space for its goats, and so the owner of the store offered to put some of the goats up on the roof during the fair and it just stuck. All of a sudden, people starting driving by to see them, and then they stopped at the store, and so there have been goats up there ever since.”

There are currently three goats that live on the roof, taken up there at the end of April and brought down again to more level pasture in mid-September. Daniel and Hendrik are the four-year-old twins, while Willy is the larger goat, older by a year. They’re social and popular – as many as 5,000 people visit the store and peer up at them on a busy summer day.

And at the end of the summer, what happens to the goats?

“They’ll go out to pasture,” says Arthur. “Don’t even suggest anything else! These goats are my wife’s pets – don’t even breathe anything different or she’ll be down here with a big stick to protect them!”

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: Today I figured out I just want to go home now. I’m missing so much of the summer and I just want to go home, relax, sleep in my own bed, hang out with my friends and just do my own thing. I want to just take a flight back home but I can’t.

Tristan, bored

I’m starting to get a bit bored of just being with my dad for four weeks and apparently another two. I want to go home.

Rip-offs and break-downs on the Trans-Canada Trek

By Mark Richardson - Tuesday, August 7, 2012 at 6:34 AM - 0 Comments

Port Alberni, British Columbia – Day 55

Trans-Canada distance: 7,204 km

Actual distance driven: 14,998 km

NOW: (Nanaimo) The ferry from Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island is officially part of the Trans-Canada Highway, linking the mainland road with the island road down to Victoria.

The arrangement is the same in the Maritimes, where the Newfoundland ferry at Port aux Basques and the PEI ferry at Wood Islands are both considered an integral part of the highway.

At the ferry kiosk

Everyone told me to book the ferry ride long in advance, because this is a holiday weekend, so I did and paid a deposit of $15. When I rolled up today, there wasn’t much traffic and the cashier asked me straight away for $80.70 for the ticket – a car and two people.

“I’ve already made a reservation and paid a $15 deposit,” I told him, expecting him to knock down the figure by 15 bucks.

“Okay,” he said, “but it’s still $80.70. That $15 is just a reservation fee – it’s not a deposit.”

So I spent $15 to make everyone’s lives easier – mine and the ferry organizers. But why? What’s the justification? What costs $15 here? Nothing, that’s what. I think it’s a complete ripoff to be charged $15 to hold a ticket, which goes back to standby anyway if you don’t turn up within 30 minutes of sailing. Even TicketMaster’s online concert reservations are cheaper – $10 for the privilege of printing your own ticket – and I think that’s also a ripoff.

The Trans-Canada Highway on the move

People have been asking me about the justification on the Trans-Canada Highway for tolls, as with the Cobequid Pass section in Nova Scotia and the Confederation Bridge and ferries, and I’ve been answering that these are costly services that have to be somehow paid for. However, an additional $15 every time for buying your ticket in advance is unconscionable. If anybody at BC Ferries can justify the cost in any way whatsoever, please leave a comment below.

Incidently, the line up for the ferry at Nanaimo back to the mainland was hugely long – anyone without a reservation was out of luck. So why the additional charge to drivers for helping everything run smoothly?

THEN: (Port Alberni) This was the original westernmost point of the Trans-Canada Highway, back in 1912 when a group of motorists drove here from Victoria, Nanaimo and Vancouver. The Malahat Highway from Victoria had just been opened and this was as far west as anyone could drive in Canada.

The meet in Alberni in 1912

Speeches were made then by various politicians and auto enthusiasts, and a highway was called for that would link the country by road instead of just rail. There were only 50,000 licensed cars in Canada, but the number was growing rapidly and the motorists could see the future.

On that day, May 4, a signpost was constructed and planted at the end of the road in Alberni; it read simply “CANADIAN HIGHWAY” and an arrow pointed east, back down the road. Some of those in attendance, including Albert Todd, the creator of the Todd Medal that I’m carrying, predicted that the Trans-Canada would be complete within five years or so.

The treasured post with its fierce protector

But there was to be controversy within just a couple of days. Residents of the rival neighbouring town of Port Alberni stole the sign and replanted it within their own city limits a couple of kilometres away. Not to be outdone, the Alberni residents promptly stole it back again.

And as Thomas Wilby described in A Motor Tour Through Canada, when he and Jack Haney arrived in Alberni in the final days of their journey: “The treasured post was tenderly restored to its rightful place on the inlet, and a bull terrier, fierce and aggressive of disposition and sharing the local indignation, was chained to it to keep watch and ward over the outward symbol of a road that is yet to ‘weave province with province, to interlace people with people.’”

Today, the long-amalgamated town of Port Alberni is more than an hour’s drive north-west from the Trans-Canada, which leads between Nanaimo and the terminus in Victoria. But it has a special place in the highway’s history nonetheless.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (New Westminster) After meeting Lorne and Peter Findlay on Friday, I was invited to join them for the annual meet of the antique chapter of the Vintage Car Club of Canada. “There’s room in my 1911 Cadillac,” said Peter, so how could I refuse?

The '08 Cadillac

I set off first with Paul Carter in his 1908 Cadillac, because he was on his own and I was to be his navigator, reading out the turn-by-turn directions for the 30-kilometre route. “My brakes aren’t very good, but I go slowly and the parking brake’s okay,” he said, none too reassuringly. There were no seat belts – at least half a century would pass before anybody even thought of them – and not even any electrics. If this Cadillac was The Standard of the World it claimed to be, the standard wasn’t very high back then.

Paul gave a hard turn of the hand crank, the engine fired without too much protest, and we putted off up the road. But something didn’t sound right. Every shift between the three gears clanged and banged and ground away, and Paul didn’t look very happy. Then after about eight kilometres, while coming down a hill and distracted by the horrible noises coming from beneath our feet, the brakes failed and we bumped into a Ford Model T truck that was stopped at a junction. Impact speed was perhaps 1 km/h but even so – Paul uttered a few timeless epithets and I hitched a ride with Steve Eremenko in his ’57 GMC truck while the Cadillac gave up on the day and headed for the garage at home.

The '32 REO

Steve and I covered another eight kilometres before we pulled up behind Lorne Findlay, who was looking under the hood of the 1932 REO sedan he’d brought along for the day. It had just coasted to a halt and Lorne, a retired mechanic, diagnosed a vapour lock in the gas line caused by excess heat. It was a very hot morning and he’d forgotten to open the ventilating louvres on the hood. “I should have brought the ’12 REO,” he lamented. “It’s gravity fed – the fuel line would have been fine.” It took 15 minutes of draining gas and blowing into the line to push the fuel through before the engine finally caught and we carried on to the finish.

After ice cream floats, everyone headed home and I hitched a lift with Peter Findlay back to his house, where the Camaro was parked. Five of us set out in his ’11 Cadillac; only two arrived. After – you guessed it – about eight kilometres, the car just ran out of power on a steep hill and ground to a halt beside the road.

Peter jumped out and cranked for all he was worth in the hot sun, sweating and straining as we all watched from the cool shade, but the engine wouldn’t catch; we were parked uphill and it was too dangerous to turn it around for a push start. With great regret, Peter suggested that the three of us who had other engagements would do better to just walk over the hill for the final kilometre back to his home.

The '11 Cadillac

“This isn’t the way I wanted it to end, but sometimes it just can’t be helped,” he said as we shook hands to say goodbye. As I walked away, an elderly woman walked up to him on the sidewalk and grasped his arm. “I used to drive in a car just like this!” she cooed. “I wish I still had it.”

“Want to buy this one?” I heard him say. “It’s going cheap today.”

Later that day, he sent me an e-mail. “Yes, I made home on my own power,” he wrote. “Cliff and I sat there for what seemed like ages (basically entertaining the passersby with their cameras).  Eventually I remembered that I had a gallon of gas in the back, so I dumped that in and managed to get it running again.  I guess it was low on fuel for hauling five people up the hill, but it should have been ok. The heat didn’t help. Anyhow, I got it home and stuck it in the garage and I’ll try it in the morning when I have more energy and both of us are a little cooler.

“After today, I hope you have a better understanding/appreciation of what the early travelers were up against. I still marvel at the thought that we were able to do 5,000 miles in Dad’s REO with virtually no problems.

After today, so do I. So do I.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12 (West Vancouver) Yesterday I attended the West 49 Lrn2sk8 (learn to skate) program. Aside from the fact it was really hot, it was great because I learned how to drop in off a ramp.

Tristan at school

I also was given a Sunny D and a prize pack with lots of stickers, a bobble head, and a poster to put on my wall. I also ended up buying a hat because if you attend the program you get a wristband that gives you 20 per cent off everything in the store for the rest of the day.

Skateboarding is really starting to get fun now that I have my new board and I can actually do some of the tricks. Hopefully I’ll get even better.

Driving into the Pacific

By Mark Richardson - Monday, August 6, 2012 at 7:18 AM - 0 Comments

West Vancouver, British Columbia – Day 52

Trans-Canada distance: 7,179 km

Actual distance driven: 14,763 km

NOW: (Vancouver) The Pacific at last!

Dipping into the Pacific

I’ve been dreaming of this day ever since leaving the Atlantic slipway at Petty Harbour in Newfoundland.  The CBC came out to film me then, and the CBC came out again today to film our arrival when we dipped the wheels in the ocean 52 days later, near Kitsilano. The weather was warm and sunny and everything went so smoothly I was worried that disaster was imminent, especially as we drove through endless construction and the heavy traffic of a long weekend – but so far, so good.

Of course, we’re not quite there yet. The Trans-Canada Highway continues west from here over the ferry to Vancouver Island, and down to Victoria. We’ll be leaving for the island on Monday.

THEN: (Vancouver) Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney drove into Vancouver on Oct. 14, 1912. Their arrival was keenly anticipated and dense crowds welcomed them to City Hall.

Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney in Vancouver

The reporter from the Vancouver Sun wrote glowingly that the REO was “stained with the evidence of strenuous travel, covered with mud and oil and grease, but with every component part performing its allotted function regularly and efficiently as the day it left the Nova Scotia coast, the Halifax to Vancouver Reo automobile, bearing the banner of the Canadian Highway Association with Mr. Thomas Wilby at the wheel, drove up in front of the Vancouver hotel at six minutes to four o’clock yesterday afternoon. The total distance travelled was 3,900 (miles).

“No tour by motor car has caused more widespread interest. The difficulties attendant upon the expedition were almost incalculable. Mountainous, unmarked country had to be traversed, water courses crossed where there were no bridges, country travelled where there were no trails or paths, and in many cases railroad rights of way and grades taken in lieu of roads. It meant the survival of the fittest. A slight defect in mechanical construction, a moment’s relax of vigilance in driving over dangerous trails, and the object of the tour would have been at naught.

“Wilby and his mechanician Mr. F.E. Hanley (sic), were both deeply tanned by exposure to all sorts of weather, but beyond that there was little to indicate either in the crew or the car the magnitude of the undertaking or the unusual nature of the trip.”

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Vancouver) We were met in Burnaby by Lorne and Irene Findlay and their son Peter, who gave us an escort to the ocean in their 1912 REO and 1962 Plymouth Valiant.

Peter and Lorne Findlay

The REO is the exact same model of vehicle that Wilby and Haney drove across the country a hundred years ago, and in 1997, the Findlays drove their car in a re-enactment of the journey from Halifax to Victoria. They were accompanied by John Nicol, now a journalist with the CBC based in Toronto, who wrote about the trip in his book The All-Red Route.

The Findlays’ REO attracted all kinds of attention on the streets of Vancouver as we followed it in to Vanier Park, where we dipped the wheels into the water of False Creek, under the Burrard Bridge. It had to be hand-cranked to start but once running it ran smoothly all the way – though the smell of the exhaust reminded us that it wouldn’t pass any emissions test these days.

It was quite something to follow the old car, and to recognize the challenge that faced Wilby and Haney, especially on the rough mud and sand roads and steep hills that set them back time and again.

When the pathfinders drove across Canada in 1912, the car ran fairly well with few incidents of reliability; when the Findlays drove the same route in 1997, they didn’t even get a flat tire.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Vancouver) Today we finally reached Vancouver! I am so happy now because the whole trip from here on we will be in the cities (my playground).

Tristan providing sound bites

We got interviewed today by CBC and I think it went a lot better than before (in Sudbury) because I knew what to say because I had been thinking up sound bites.

So far Vancouver has been great and hopefully it can only get better!!!!! 

Hanging out on the road to the ocean

By Mark Richardson - Friday, August 3, 2012 at 10:18 PM - 0 Comments

Abbotsford, British Columbia – Day 51

Trans-Canada distance: 7,114 km

Actual distance driven: 14,650 km

NOW: (Hope) The fast way through from Kamloops to Hope is on Hwy. 5, the Coquihalla Highway. It’s four-to-six lanes all the way through, shaving 60 kilometres off the distance with a 110 km/h speed limit, and was completed in the mid-1980s when it was opened as a toll road. The tolls were ended in 2008.

The Trans-Canada north of Lytton, BC

This means that the Trans-Canada Highway in this region, which continues west for about 70 km to Cache Creek and then follows the Thompson and Fraser rivers south to Hope, is really more of a tourist route now than a commercial road. It’s the only part of the entire route across the country that’s been sidelined like this, but this is not a bad thing: the road twists through the canyons and offers fabulous scenery to drivers. It’s not the quick route, but it is the stunning one.

Just don’t be in a hurry. While there are plenty of three-lane overtaking sections, there are also plenty of sections where the two lanes are in the opposite direction, climbing a long hill, and double yellow lines prevent overtaking the slow moving lumber trucks and RVs that must descend more slowly for their greater weight and more challenged brakes.

Why was the Trans-Canada not redesignated to run along the Coquihalla when it opened, to follow the original directive of “the shortest practical route”? I don’t know – can somebody enlighten me?

THEN: (Lytton) The roads through the Fraser River canyons were not designed for cars when Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney drove them in 1912. They’d been built a half-century earlier for wagon trains to bring supplies to the gold miners at Barkerville, and they were as basic and precipitous as they could be.

The road around Lytton's Jackass Mountain in 1913.

The two pathfinders, with a third man named Earl Wise, made slow progress to Lytton from Lillooet, continuing so late into the night that their acetylene tank ran dry, which meant they had no headlights. Their kerosene-powered parking lights were too dim to be of use, being up high beside the windshield, but they could not just park and wait for dawn because their car filled the entire road, blocking the way for the horse-drawn freighters that needed no lights.

Consequently, described Wilby in A Motor Tour Through Canada, Wise took one of the kerosene lights and “stretched himself at full length along the mudguard next to the outer edge of the road, reached out his arm so as to bring the lamp close to the ground, and boldly gave the signal “Go ahead!” Ten miles on one’s stomach, holding a light over a sheer drop of hundreds of feet is a devilishly unpleasant role! Inch by inch we crept on. Moment by moment the poor fellow grew stiffer. A sudden jolt and it seemed as if we must throw him down the bank. A flicker of the light, and it seemed as if we all, car and passengers, were already over the brink. We were incessantly rounding a series of bluffs, twisting and turning in short, sharp curves that shut out the road ahead. Conversation languished. The unfortunate man progressing on his stomach gave vent to his emotions only in occasional grunts.”

Eventually, they arrived safely in Lytton, where they had no choice but to put the car on a train south to Yale. The Canadian Pacific Railway was built through the Fraser Canyon on the site of the old Cariboo Road and it was not driveable. It would take the pathfinders only three more days to reach Vancouver; their night drive would be the final true challenge of their long journey.

Simon Fraser on the cliffs above Hell's Gate

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Hell’s Gate) British Columbians know the story of Simon Fraser exploring the region here in 1808, passing through the narrow and deep Hell’s Gate section of the canyon on wooden planks suspended by ropes from high above.

The Cariboo Road

The road that finally made its way through the canyon was the Cariboo Road, which also literally hung off the cliff face in many of its steeper sections. It was used only by horse-drawn wagons, but it was important to keep the horses calm on the trail high above the river. When the railroad replaced it, tunnels were blasted through the rock to avoid hanging the rails out in mid-air.

These days, it’s a simple drive to Hell’s Gate but visitors still get to suspend themselves over the canyon. Gondolas drop 175 metres down from the road to the opposite side of the river, and a suspension bridge crosses back over the fast and deep water. The river here has three times the volume of Niagara Falls, apparently, and its crossing can still bring butterflies to the stomach.

Hell's Gate today

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Hell’s Gate) Today we went to Hell’s Gate just north of Hope on the Fraser canyon. It was okay except for the fact that you have to pay for just about anything there. Although they did have very good ice cream, especially the mint chocolate chip kind.

They also had a suspension bridge that went right over the water, which was pretty cool.

Other than that today was pretty great and I’m really happy because tomorrow we get to Vancouver, the city I’ve been looking forward to the most. Yaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!

Danger on the narrow highway

By Mark Richardson - Thursday, August 2, 2012 at 7:05 AM - 0 Comments

Kamloops, British Columbia – Day 50

Trans-Canada distance: 6,762 km

Actual distance driven: 14,272 km

NOW: (Sicamous) Most of the Trans-Canada between Revelstoke and Sicamous is two lanes. Get stuck behind a truck – or more likely at this time of year, an RV – and you’ll be following it for a while. Traffic moves at the speed of the lowest common denominator. This encourages risky overtaking, but it also squeezes oncoming vehicles together.

Rob and Claire Young

Rob Young knows this, which is why he refuses to take his bicycle on that stretch of road. He’s on a cycling trip with his 14-year-old daughter Claire; they left their home in Nelson on Saturday and plan to return Friday. They’ve been cycling the mountain roads under their own power, but when I met them today they were looking for a sympathetic pickup truck driver.

“When you’re driving it, it’s just too narrow,” he said. “The shoulder’s dodgy and it’s too narrow for two vehicles to pass with bicycles on the side of the road. I don’t like to even drive it in a car, but I won’t take a bicycle on it.”

THEN: (Creston) Far south of the future Trans-Canada, and making much slower progress, Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney finally ran out of road again in 1912 at the railway town of Yahk. It was night time and as they had first discovered at North Bay, there were places where there just weren’t any paths or trails to follow.

But they didn’t give up – there was still an alternative, thanks to a pair of guides and the railroad.

“We were astride the glittering rails which were to lead us along the intense darkness of the Yahk Loop,” wrote Wilby in his book, A Motor Tour Through Canada.

Jack Haney fixing a tire in 1912

“There was a gasp as one felt the first forward plunge of the car and the white path of acetylene light shot before us into the immense shadows of that forest wilderness. Four pairs of eyes strove to pierce the distance ahead and behind; and every nerve was strained in listening for a possible monster of steel and steam which might dash down upon us at any moment from around a curve, or catch us in its swift career from behind! Muscles were tense, ready for the leap to a precarious safety at the first sight of an approaching headlight…”

They didn’t realize in the dark that they were on the edge of a cliff with a 160 metre drop, descending at times so steeply that the car would roll under its own weight. They endured “incessant and infernal jiggling and jolting that shook the teeth and vibrated through the spine.” Sometimes, they got stuck between the ties and would have to jack up the car to roll forward again; their rear tires were ripped apart by the ties’ spikes. After they finally found a road again, it took another three hours to drive the 19 kilometres through the soft gravel of the narrow road through the Goat River Gorge, listening to the loosened stones bouncing down to the river 150 metres below.

They arrived in Creston at 3 a.m., exhausted, though Haney was still able to summarize the drive in his understated diary: “Had h__l of a time getting to Creston… Fourteen miles on ties, and up some fierce hills.”

The Last Spike

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Craigellachie) For much of its route the Trans-Canada follows the rail line across the country, and here, 46 kilometres west of Revelstoke, is where the Last Spike was hammered home in 1885 to complete the original link across the country.

The caretaker of the site here, Lorne, located for us the actual spike on the track that was “the last spike,” right beside the monument, but pointed out that the original spike was removed immediately and replaced with another, slightly larger. He also pointed out that in the famous photo of the spike being hammered in by CPR director Sir Donald Smith, there seem to be a number of empty places on adjacent ties that are still waiting for spikes of their own, so perhaps it was not truly the final piece of the railroad.

Pounding it home in 1885

And just for good measure, he mentioned that the track has been replaced seven times since 1885. It reminded me of the street sweeper who’s proud that he still uses the same broom after years of service, though the brush has been replaced 10 times and it’s on its ninth handle.

“There are a lot of stories here that never made it into the history books,” Lorne said, and told us about 26 Chinese workers who died of starvation in their construction camp later that winter of ’85. Apparently, the train driver was under orders not to stop for any reason between stations, and the out-of-work labourers were snowed in and couldn’t leave the camp. “You won’t find that story written anywhere,” he said. Well, true or not, I’m proving him wrong now…

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12 (Revelstoke) Today my dad left his keys on the counter for like the billionth time. It was on the counter of the McDonalds in Revelstoke.

Recovered, fortunately

At first we couldn’t find them so my dad was a bit concerned, as he should be because we don’t want anyone driving off with our only mode of transportation. Someone had turned them in but that was a close one. I can only imagine how bad it would be if we lost them.

Other than that our day was pretty much any other day of just driving and stopping and asking people questions. Tomorrow is a questionable day because we don’t know where we are going but hopefully it will be great regardless.

A rough road around the Bend

By Mark Richardson - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 at 7:26 AM - 0 Comments

Revelstoke, British Columbia – Day 49

Trans-Canada distance: 6,550 km

Actual distance driven: 13,986 km

THEN: (Revelstoke) For decades, the Rogers Pass was considered impractical for a highway, thanks to its mountainous terrain and heavy snowfall.

The Big Bend Highway

In the 1930s, when the government committed to building a road across the Rockies, it preferred the Big Bend route that followed the Columbia River north from Revelstoke in a 300-kilometre loop back down to Golden. The road was built at great cost and mostly by pick and shovel, taking 11 years to construct through the Depression before it opened in 1940, not quite complete. But it was never very good – narrow, dusty, corrugated gravel and little scenery to speak of, except dense stands of cedar and the occasional glimpse of the river. Most drivers avoided it, instead putting their cars on the train that ran through the Pass.

Journalist Bob Metcalfe once described a drive in 1960 in which he “joined a motoring fraternity whose Big Bend stories improved with age.

“They’re stories of broken springs, shock absorbers, axles and nerves; cracked windshields, lights, sumps and composure; lost tailpipes, mufflers, hub-caps and reason. Skeletons of cars, stripped of worthwhile parts and abandoned after major mishaps, lie forlornly at intervals by the roadside; others that went over steep embankments lie where they came to rest, battered wrecks…”

And so, instead of continuing to maintain an untenable highway, the decision was made in 1956 to build the new Trans-Canada through the Rogers Pass. The initial budget was estimated at $22 million for the 143 kilometres of road, though after seven years — two years longer than expected—the total cost came in at about four times that, or a million bucks a mile.

As Daniel Francis describes in his excellent book A Road For Canada: “The challenges of the Rogers Pass section were many. The site was isolated. Weather was unpredictable. Terrain was steep, criss-crossed by deep gorges and prone to landslides. Workers got used to blasting a stretch of right-of-way only to have it buried under a new pile of rubble cascading down from the slopes above.”

Sound familiar?

*

The official provincial marker

The road through the Rogers Pass was officially opened 50 years ago yesterday by B.C. Premier WAC Bennett. He and the Alberta minister for roads cut a ribbon across the highway about 13 kilometres east of Revelstoke, and declared the road open. According to the Revelstoke Review that week, “An actual count of those around the ceremony placed the number at close to 3,000. In addition, it was estimated that 30,000 people were in the seven miles of cars lined up two abreast on each side of the ribbon, waiting to get through.”

Most important, though, the newspaper account went on to add: “Tourists who lined the highway in the miles of procession breathed a sigh of relief when the minister of highways announced at the official opening that the highway would remain open.” For as I wrote yesterday, the Trans-Canada itself was scheduled to open five weeks later by Prime Minister Diefenbaker at a ceremony on the summit. Officially, Bennett held the provincial ceremony early because he would be unable to attend the national event; unofficially, BC and Ottawa were arguing about money. Like anything ever changes.

At that federal ceremony on Sept. 3, the local MP welcomed the distinguished visitors and made the pointed observation that 347,000 people had already entered the park in the 33 days since the road was opened. I’ll bet that went down well.

NOW: (Revelstoke) Mayor David Raven says the traffic safety issues of the two-lane Trans-Canada in his town are starting to become personal. On average, seven people are killed every year on this section of the highway up to the summit of the Pass, and it’s due to excess speed, driver fatigue, and the design of the road.

David Raven, mayor of Revelstoke

“Living on the highway, we service it but we also have to pick up the carnage,” he says. Last fall, when Raven realized that four people had been killed on the road so far that year, he says he braced for the news of the next three to die and sure enough, a mother and her two children were killed when their car was flattened by a semi-trailer. The road becomes narrow and slippery when there’s snow built up on its sides, and the drivers just run out of room to avoid accidents.

“I made a presentation to the premier just this morning about it,” he told me over coffee. “I asked her for a commitment to the highway. It’s not for us or the city, but for the skiers who come to visit.” There are 2,000 to 3,000 skiers driving the road every day in the winter, sometimes up to 10,000 in a day. On average, 12,000 vehicles drive the road every day throughout the year, with more than half of them being commercial traffic. Those are far more than the highway was designed to carry.

Ideally, the road will be twinned to four lanes all the way through, as it is on the prairie and through Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, but the cost is excessive in this mountainous region: roughly a billion dollars, and that’s just the section from Revelstoke to the summit.

So what did Premier Christy Clark say to the mayor’s request? “She said, ‘Thanks Dave,’” he sighed. “It’ll be costly to build it, but it has to be rebuilt and maintained anyway. The money should be spent now to get it right.”

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Revelstoke) I saw this sign on a store window here in town: “Check the ‘Stoke List’ for days open. You don’t use the ‘Stoke List’ – ask a young person.”

Not sure? Check the Stoke list...

“Stoke list”? This made no sense to me. Nor would it to Tristan, but I asked him anyway, since he’s 12 years old: “Hey – what do you think the ‘Stoke list’ is?”

“Dad – we’re in Revelstoke. It’ll be online. It’ll be a list of businesses in Revelstoke,” he said.

I can’t bring myself to check if there’s a commercial website for Revelstoke but I’m sure there is. And did I mention yesterday  that I just turned 50?

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Revelstoke) Today I didn’t really do anything. I woke up, had a shower, got in the car and drove to Revelstoke and that’s pretty much it.

So what I’m going to do is show you a bunch of pictures of the Rockies to let you see some stuff we’ve been seeing.

View west at the Rogers Pass summit

Feeding more gophers

Lake Revelstoke

Motel swimming pool Fail!

Happy birthday at the summit

By Mark Richardson - Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Rogers Pass, British Columbia – Day 48

Trans-Canada distance: 6,479 km

Actual distance driven: 13,912 km

THEN: (Rogers Pass) Happy birthday today to the Trans-Canada Highway! It was opened 50 years ago when BC Premier WAC Bennett declared BC Hwy. 1 open at the Rogers Pass. At that moment, in front of 7,000 people, he snipped a ribbon near Revelstoke, 70 km west of here, and the current road was open to be driven across the country.

The national opening ceremony in 1962 at Rogers Pass

There’s no celebration of this here today, though. That’s because Bennett’s provincial ceremony had pipped the federal government to the line – the official opening of the Trans-Canada Highway took place Sept. 3 in front of another 4,000 people, here at the summit of the Pass in Glacier National Park. That’s when Prime Minister John Diefenbaker tamped down a patch of asphalt and declared the Trans-Canada Highway to be open. Except that motorists had been driving it for the previous five weeks.

This was all due to money squabbles. Bennett wanted the feds to pay a greater portion of the cost of construction, but Diefenbaker refused, reasoning that Ottawa was already covering the complete cost of construction through all national parks, including both Revelstoke and Glacier on the run through here to Golden.

“There was one of the most peculiar, self-centred actions that I’ve ever known,” Diefenbaker said later of Bennett’s ceremony.

The national ceremony was not without its own controversy, though. It was snubbed by both Newfoundland and New Brunswick, both of which claimed, not incorrectly, that their portions of the road were far from finished. In Newfoundland, 600 km of the 1,000 km highway had yet to be paved and Joey Smallwood was holding out for more money. Did he get it? Find out more about the “Complete the Drive by ’65” movement here.

*

The Rogers Pass took six years to construct through some of the most challenging terrain in the country. There was already a CP rail track through the pass, completed just before the last spike was pounded home in 1885, but was a dangerous track – hundreds of people were killed by snowfalls and avalanches before it was pushed underground by the eight-kilometre Connaught Tunnel in 1916. I’ll tell more about the TCH’s remarkable construction here in tomorrow’s blog.

NOW: (Rogers Pass) The Rogers Pass is not the highest point of the highway – that’s the Kicking Horse Pass east of here, which I mentioned yesterday. It’s still plenty high, though, at 1,330 metres (4,364 feet) and gets an average of more than eight metres of snow every season.

Snow tunnel on the TCH

Much of the challenge of the road’s completion was to protect it from avalanches. This is done with – among other things – explosive charges to knock out large accumulations of snow before they have a chance to build, and cone-shaped barriers of concrete scattered on the mountainside to dissipate sliding snow.

Most obvious, though, are the snow tunnels: literally, above-ground tunnels that mean any avalanches pass over them and into the valley below, without affecting the road itself. When I drove through here last summer, I assumed these were actual tunnels that cut through the cliff-face, but they’re not. They weren’t created to ease the road’s construction but to prevent its destruction.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Rogers Pass) And happy birthday to me, too! I was born at the exact moment that Bennett was cutting that ribbon 50 years ago. People tell me I was born to drive this highway, but I think I’m just up for a good road trip.

On the phone with the CBC at the Rogers Pass hotel

You may have heard me explaining this on Monday. If you listen to CBC in the afternoon, there’s a good chance you did: I had 16 consecutive interviews with local radio hosts, each for 10 minutes or so. Phew!

The interviews were booked through the CBC’s syndication service, and then they called to make sure I was still available. The problem was the only fitting place for me to do this was from here on the summit of the Rogers Pass, and I really needed a landline. My cell phone had five bars of connection on it because there’s a Bell tower up here, but then a thunderstorm rolled in and the service dropped off, usually just as I was getting introspective. CBC Charlottetown in PEI lost me during a live broadcast and never did call back – sorry.

The view through the window

There’s a hotel up here though – who knew? – and I booked a room that came with its own phone for the final dozen interviews. It’s an older hotel, built just 18 months after the opening of the pass. A couple of fellow travellers driving home to Vancouver from Halifax met me up here after keeping in touch throughout this journey and they took Tristan off for lunch while I set things up. Thanks, Ed and Bev Frazer.

Happy birthday!

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Rogers Pass) Today was my dad’s birthday and I bought him a gift that I think he enjoyed. It is basically a guy riding a motorcycle that you can put a wine bottle in to create the body.

We are staying in a hotel right on the Rogers Pass and he’s definitely happy about that because of the whole “birthday at the same time as the opening of the Rogers Pass” thing.

Also, at our hotel, one of those tourist buses showed up and a whole bunch of people unloaded and were fascinated with the gophers. They took lots of pictures of me because I happened to be feeding the gophers at the time they showed up so maybe I’ll be famous in China.

Tristan with the gophers

Today was a great day and maybe and hopefully tomorrow will be too.

Mud slides and white water

By Mark Richardson - Monday, July 30, 2012 at 7:24 AM - 0 Comments

Glacier National Park, British Columbia – Day 46 and 47

Trans-Canada distance: 6,452 km

Actual distance driven: 13,812 km

Today, Monday, is the big day: the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Rogers Pass in 1962, which effectively opened the Trans-Canada to traffic across the country.

I’ll be on CBC radio this afternoon talking from the summit of the Rogers Pass with hosts across Canada about the significance of the Trans-Canada. Listen in to your regional show to hear what I have to say about the highway, my drive and this blog. And be sure to read here tomorrow to find out all about the anniversary.

THEN: (Frank, B.C.) The original pathfinders in 1912 could not follow a road anywhere near the current Trans-Canada – it just didn’t exist. Instead, Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney stayed south of Calgary and headed west from Lethbridge, Alberta, but they needed a guide to point them in the right direction. As driver Haney wrote later in Motoring magazine:

Finding a path for the REO through the mountains

“The road winds in and out, up and down. Our pilot suggested a hinge in the centre of the car to facilitate making some of the turns. Near Frank, we narrowly escaped going into a torn out bridge. We had lost the road and were playing blind man’s buff around some large stones. We finally came to the conclusion that we were getting no nearer Vancouver so we stopped to collect our few remaining wits and look around. Our guide climbed out of the car and went prowling off into the dark, but soon returned with the information that a light could be seen around the hill behind us. We soon had our directions again and found that we were only a quarter of a mile from a small town and three miles from Frank.”

Ten years later, Percy Gomery and his wife the Skipper followed a similar route along a narrow, mountainside road, recounted in his book A Motor Scamper ’Cross Canada:

“Spurting up a hill both steep and high, we found ourselves tossed on to a narrow ledge of a precipitous, shrub-grown hillside. Here, clearly, passing another vehicle was impossible. A quarter-mile of such road sounds a short drive, but it is a long time to hold one’s breath! We drove fully that distance with chances of turning out quite hopeless. Then appeared a man on horseback, seemingly a cowboy, though I have never been sure. Passing room for even an equestrian was out of the question….

“Laying the end of the reins smartly on his horse’s flank, the rider forced his animal about twenty feet up the steep incline, turned to face us and scornfully switched his arm westward ordering me to proceed. Although I did this very cautiously, the manoeuvre was too much for the prairie steed. Just as we came underneath, he became frantic and, first plunging, then rolling, he came down on our little car, smashing the mudguard, one headlight and a few more ornaments of out mantelpiece. The rider was thrown heavily, his legs being well under the front axle when the car stopped. The horse had scrambled up and made off down the trail ahead of us, bleeding freely from a long cut in the hind quarters. The cowboy, his very muteness declaring his rage and humiliation, leaped to his feet and ran after the beast…”

NOW: (Banff) An estimated 74 million tonnes of rock slid onto the town of Frank in 1903, obliterating the community and killing 80 of its 81 residents. This month, a torrent of mud the size of a football field slipped down from the mountainside and buried the Trans-Canada Highway just west of Banff. Hundreds of people were inconvenienced when the road was closed for cleanup; nobody was hurt.

At the entrance to Kicking Horse Pass

Mudslides and avalanches do kill people here, but they’re better controlled then ever before, just as communities are better designed than they’ve ever been. But even so, the ones that do the damage are rarely anticipated.

We drove through Kicking Horse Pass today, the highest point of the entire Trans-Canada Highway at 1,627 metres (5,338 feet). Its two lanes are relatively narrow and it has tighter 40 km/h curves than the Trans-Canada near the Cabot Trail in that I questioned in Nova Scotia. There are chain-mail sheets hung high beside the road to catch falling rocks. The road is downright dangerous for bad drivers in poor weather, but on a blue sky day like today, it felt safe, secure – and marvellous.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Canmore) Last month, I ran a contest on my Twitter account (@WheelsMark), asking followers to send me their Trans-Canada roadtrip stories. The winner was Jeremy Kroeker in Canmore, and I met with him over dinner last night to give him $100 in gift cards for East Side Marios restaurants.

Jeremy Kroeker

His winning entry is here, but it’s not too late to send me your own family roadtrip story for another $100 in gift cards at East Side Marios. No more than 300 words, please, and send it to me directly at markrichardson888@gmail.com. Entries close at the end of this coming weekend.

*

My old Chevy S-10 would not start. After two days of bone-shattering cold in Canmore, Alberta, the battery was dead and you couldn’t dent the oil with a chisel. CAA sent someone out that night, but it was hopeless.

I needed the truck in the morning, though. I had promised to meet my parents in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

The truck lacked a block heater, so I set up my camp stove under the oil pan to blast it with fire. My friend Tom connected a battery booster. Soon the engine turned over, but it still wouldn’t catch.

Tom had a solution, though – ether. He opened the air filter and sprayed into my injectors. The can hissed while I cycled the ignition.

I had just leaned out of the window to remind Tom about the stove when the night lit up with a “WHOOOOF!” I imagined Tom with a freshly blackened face, still bent over the engine. But he was ok so I kept cranking.

Except, now my engine was on fire. I jumped out to help Tom throw snow on everything. After that we stood there, just staring. 

“I think we almost had it,” said Tom.

I got back in the cab and Tom kept spraying ether until the engine started.

The truck made the trip the next day and I met my parents, but on the way back there was a horrible knocking. I called a few mechanics who all agreed that the cost of repairs would be greater than the value of the truck.

So I tried driving home, but the truck finally died along the Trans-Canada Highway. I called CAA again. Then I sold my S-10 to a tow-truck driver from Brooks, Alberta for $2 – which is less than I paid for the can of ether.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Canmore, Alta.) Yesterday was great because we went white water rafting for about two hours. It was so fun because there was great scenery, lots of drops, and even lots of little nooks and crannies for us to do cool stuff like flip the boat.

Getting wet on the Kananaskis River

I think that by far the best part was that I got to use the water gun that was at the bottom of the raft to squirt other people. At the end of the ride we also played a game called trust where basically you use the T-grips at the end of your paddle to hook onto someone else’s and lean back as far as you can and see if the person tries to let go. My dad tried to let go but I stayed in the boat so he just pushed me in with his paddle.

We also tried to climb up on an iron bridge so that we could jump off but my dad pulled me down into the water. After the ride was over we were all treated to pop and cookies, which was great if you ask me.

We have also been going through the beautiful Rockies, which is fantastic because tonight we are in a hotel room that looks right out over the Rockies. And tomorrow is my dad’s birthday and I have a special gift for him so I’m excited to see his face tomorrow.

At the Olympic Park, and remembering a great author

By Mark Richardson - Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

Calgary, Alberta – Day 45

Trans-Canada distance: 6,149 km

Actual distance driven: 13,373  km

THEN and NOW: (Cochrane) In researching the Trans-Canada Highway during the past year, one name and source kept cropping up: Edward McCourt, the author of the 1965 book The Road Across Canada.

The Road Across Canada

McCourt and his wife, Margaret, drove the highway from St. John’s to Victoria the summer after it opened, when much of the road was still to be completed. The journey and its subsequent chronicle was commissioned by publisher Jack McClelland, who knew McCourt as a talented writer and meticulous researcher and the author of a series of novels set on the prairie.

Little else is known about him though, and especially now. He was a professor of English Literature at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, but his novels sold only a few hundred copies at their best and after he died in 1972, he slipped into near total obscurity. This is a great shame, because his Trans-Canada book is both insightful and inspirational, and his writing is as fresh and witty today as when he and Margaret were slogging along the two-lane gravel road. Consider this, describing a detour from Calgary along the old Banff highway, Route 1A, known as the Banff Trail:

The view from Cochrane

In some respects the old highway is even more scenic than the new – at certain points it affords a broader panorama embracing the entire sweep of the Bow Valley and the mountains beyond. One of the finest views in all Canada is that from the turn-out at the top of the great hill above the village of Cochrane twenty miles west of Calgary – a magnificent expanse of river, valley, foothills, mountains, and overarching sky juxtaposed in a flawlessly balanced harmony, so flawless as to suggest a deliberately contrived artistic improvement on nature. It is a view of which no man can ever tire, for although the elements are fixed, permanent, the colour- and cloud-patterns change minute by minute so that the communicated effect is of something at once enduring and at the same time forever new.

I drove out to Cochrane today, partly to see that view but mostly to meet with Edward McCourt’s son Michael, who now lives there. Michael is a retired television journalist and foreign correspondent – most recently the anchor of City TV’s breakfast show in Calgary – and he was pleased to meet with me to talk about his dad.

Michael McCourt

“There’s been a glimmer of interest in the last decade,” Michael told me. “Some people have asked, ‘Who was this guy? And could anyone so prolific actually be any good?’”

Part of the reason for McCourt’s lack of sales success was, in Michael’s words, that his dad had “almost pathological shyness,” unwilling to promote his books in person but preferring to let the writing stand for itself. In other respects though, McCourt was tenacious and committed: he studied for high school while working full-time on his parents’ prairie farm and went on to become both a Rhodes Scholar and an exceptional athlete, accomplished in the heavy sports of discus and shot putt. “His greatest expression was through his writing,” explained Michael. “His last communication to me was with a note. He couldn’t talk to me to tell me that he loved me, but he could write it in a note. It’s how he was.”

The Road Across Canada was published in the same year that McCourt found a small canker on his tongue, which was cancerous and would kill him within seven years. In that time, though, he wrote and published travel books about Saskatchewan and the Yukon, and a biography of British army officer Sir William Butler. When he died, remembers Michael, he had just returned from Ireland, working on a biography of poet W.B. Yeats.

For someone so prolific, writing was still a painstaking task: “He wrote by longhand, and sometimes he would go into his study at the house in Saskatoon with a page that was blank, and come out several hours later with a page that was still blank. But other times, he’d written a dozen pages and he would be so happy for it.”

Michael has copies of all his father’s books and has read them all, as has his daughter Tracy, a fine arts major; he also has a “big box” of his father’s letters and unpublished writing in his basement, some of it too personal for him to read easily, which Tracy will inherit one day. Could there be another book in there? “I don’t know, but I think so,” Michael says. “I hope so.”

Tristan and I will be driving finally into the mountains tomorrow, so let’s leave the last word with Edward McCourt, who loved the prairies with committed passion:

The plainsman like myself is likely to find his first plunge into the mountains on the Calgary-Banff run an alarming experience. Not because of the Highway gradients, which are gentle, nor the curves, which are also gentle and well-banked, but because of the sudden feeling of being separated from all familiar things. Before we are aware of what is happening the beautiful but sinister Three Sisters and assorted kinsfolk have slipped in behind us and cut off our retreat. But the valley ahead broadens – there us still room to breathe. We are not yet fenced in. Not quite.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Calgary) Since we’re here in Calgary, and the Olympics opened today in London, it seemed only right to visit the Olympic Park from the 1988 winter games.

On the zipline

There’s a special deal where you can both ride a zipline down the route of the ski jump and take a bobsled ride down the mountain course, for $99. After throwing myself from an airplane over Moose Jaw and riding a zipline through Eagle Canyon in northern Ontario, Tristan and I could hardly resist.

The zipline was very fast – in fact, too fast. Unlike Eagle Canyon, when I ground to a halt five metres from the end and had to be dragged onto the dock, I slammed into the end much harder than anyone expected. It’s advertised as a 140 km/h ride, but I’m sure I was gong faster than that. Want to see proof? Watch the video here.

I was glad to be able to film the zipline run with my GoPro, where the helmets were fitted with camera attachments. At Eagle Canyon, cameras were forbidden and they told me at length that it’s because the government won’t allow them – they’re too distracting. This is nonsense, of course, as we both knew, but it was their canyon and their zipline and they could make whatever rules they want.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12 … (Calgary) In the past two days we’ve done a bunch of cool stuff. We went zip lining and bobsledding and I finally finished off my cross-Canada skateboard. I finished it by buying a new set of Bones wheels.

Zip lining was much better than the one we went to in Ontario because it was a much steeper incline. Although it was better it had one fault. When we went down we dropped a parachute near the end and then pulled our legs up to brake but that didn’t slow us down at all so we hit the end like a car crash and it hurt. So after us, the rest of the people going had to drop their parachutes right at the beginning.

Bobsledding was a lot of fun too. We went 90 km/h around a long track and the turns were almost vertical.

Dion fits Tristan's new wheels

Most important, I finally built my skate board. We paid a quick visit to the skate park afterwards and I had lots of fun.

A safer highway, and looking for Punch Buggies

By Mark Richardson - Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 7:23 AM - 0 Comments

Calgary, Alberta – Day 43

Trans-Canada distance: 6,142 km

Actual distance driven: 13,213 km 

THEN: (Medicine Hat) Stan Sauer used to be the president of the Alberta twinning association for the Trans-Canada Highway. This is going back a few years – the retired GM auto dealer remembers that it was back in the early 1970s that the association was pressing for the two-lane TCH to be expanded to a four-lane highway, with a wide, grassed centre median.

Stan Sauer

This is significantly safer for motorists: any accidents or collisions take place among traffic that’s all headed in the same direction, avoiding the deadly impact of oncoming vehicles.

He recalls that Alberta was the first province in Canada to begin twinning its highway – a relatively straightforward project since land is plentiful and, with the exception of the western mountains around Canmore and Banff, it’s fairly flat and easy to build a road upon. The extra two lanes spread east and west from Calgary and were finally completed in the early ’80s, making Alberta the first province to finish the four-lane TCH.

“We had the official opening but I’d hurt my back and had to phone in my comments to the ceremony,” says Stan. “It was a great moment, though. The Trans-Canada had been like a goat trail in the beginning but when it was twinned it became a proper highway. As far as we were concerned (in Alberta), it was done then. Everything since has been maintenance.”

NOW: (Calgary) The Trans-Canada used to pass directly through the downtown areas of the communities along its way; the local merchants lobbied for this. In 1962, as I wrote about in Prince Edward Island last month, it went right through Charlottetown, coming to a halt at the lights in front of Province House. In Montreal, the Trans-Canada ran down St. Catharine Street in the centre of town.

This may have worked for the tourist traffic, but it was a disaster for the increasing truck and commercial traffic, which has grown ever since the scaling back of the railroad system and the advent of Just In Time deliveries. Consequently, the provinces have been building bypasses to move trucks outside of town.

The Finlay Bridge in Medicine Hat

Medicine Hat is a good example: the Trans-Canada used to cross the river over the narrow Finlay Bridge close to City Hall, but for a long time now it’s been on a bypass to the south that keeps all through traffic out of the core.

In some communities where the road is smaller and the traffic lighter, it still passes through town: in Mattawa,  for example, there’s been talk of a bypass for years but few people believe it will happen in their lifetimes because the return doesn’t justify the enormous expense. Sudbury, however, is more typical of a city building a costly bypass system to ensure that trucks and through traffic stay out of downtown.

But out West, both Winnipeg and here in Calgary are proud exceptions. They both have excellent bypasses, but they still route the TCH right through the centre of town. Truckers know which route to take. While other communities have redesignated their bypasses to be the new Trans-Canada, neither Winnipeg nor Calgary have changed the name. Good for them. 

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Calgary) Ever since my son joined me on this journey a couple of weeks ago, he’s been bashing me on the arm every time he sees a Volkswagen Beetle. “Punch Buggy!” he calls out. “No punch back!”

The latest generation Punch Buggy, in Calgary

I think he spends his whole time in the passenger seat looking for punch buggies, and he always seems to spot them first. When we found the VW Beetle limo in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, which I wrote about here, he really went to town on my arm.

So when Tristan fell asleep today in the car and didn’t notice the VW Beetle parked beside the road when we were in Calgary, I took a photo of it for later. “Hey, look what I saw today,” I told him when he woke up. He looked at the picture on the iPhone and I saw the recognition come to his eyes, then he started to turn at me in his seat but it was already too late. “Punch Buggy! No punch back!” I called gleefully. Revenge is sweet.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12 (Medicine Hat): Today was a very exciting day because we paid a visit to the Medicine Hat art place thingy (DAD’S NOTE: This is Medalta Potteries, a working pottery and ceramics business in the city’s Clay District that has a beautifully restored factory and museum).

The creation of Poto de Tristano

The mayor presented me with a Medicine Hat Tigers hockey jersey and I also had an opportunity to make a pot at a pottery wheel. My pot is a sort of abstract creation that I call Poto De Tristano.

We were also given a tour of the whole building and told many stories of how it burned down and other stuff like that. It was actually quite a cool place, and if I was an artist I would definitely want to work there.

Tonight we are in Calgary, Alberta, and so we will be for the next two days. Tomorrow we have a whole bunch of fun stuff planned but I don’t want to spoil anything for you so I’ll keep it a secret for now. Today was great and from now on I think it only gets better.

A smooth ride under a big sky

By Mark Richardson - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 at 10:28 AM - 0 Comments

Medicine Hat, Alberta – Day 42

Trans-Canada distance: 5,849 km

Actual distance driven: 12,852 km

THEN: (Gull Lake, Sask.) In 1912, there were no road maps to guide the way west. Thomas Wilby wrote that he and Jack Haney were led across the prairie by a local driver along roads and tracks “of the most amazing description, wheeling and returning on his course at the most unexpected places, and darting across the rough stubble while his car swayed and pitched like a tiny craft caught in a heavy swell.

“We bumped through sand dust and furrows, manoeuvring in wide sweeps like swift-wheeling cavalry until we picked up the railroad in the absence of any other recognized route. Gates had to be opened and shut incessantly, and it was evident that for at least half the time we were on no commonly recognized highway.”

Victor the tourist guide, with a $2 road map

SOMETHING DIFFERENT … (Walsh, Alta.) At the Alberta Welcome Centre, plenty of free tourist literature is readily provided but it costs $2 for a provincial road map. Alberta is the only province to charge visitors for its road maps.

“It’s just always been that way,” says Victor the tourist guide. “We have a road map here from 1987, and it was two bucks back then.”

NOW: (Medicine Hat) There’s little doubt that Alberta’s 55 kilometres of Trans-Canada from the provincial border to here is the best quality of highway I’ve driven since New Brunswick.

It’s smooth and wide and properly painted and well maintained – no seams of bitumen or patched-over potholes. It’s four lanes, safely twinned, and a pleasure to drive underneath the big sky.

Best of all, when it’s time to stop for fuel, gas is selling for $1.15.9 / litre, which is a far cry from the $1.35 of Newfoundland and Northern Ontario last month.

Preparing the cannon

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Fort Walsh, Sask.)

Today we went to Fort Walsh. We looked at many artifacts and then watched a movie on the history of the Fort Walsh massacre.

We eventually made our way down to the actual fort and watched a cannon being fired because a group of people had arranged for it. Everyone was saying how loud the cannon was, but compared to other cannons that I’ve heard it wasn’t actually that bad.

We also had a little bit of a tour of the camp before we had to leave for Medicine Hat because the CAA had to take pictures of my dad and the car.

Cypress Hills in my opinion was a great escape from the long flat prairie and now that we are in Alberta we won’t be seeing prairie for much longer.

Fort Walsh, in the Cypress Hills

Decline and development of the prairie

By Mark Richardson - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at 7:22 AM - 0 Comments

Swift Current, Saskatchewan – Day 41

Trans-Canada distance: 5,627 km

Actual distance driven: 12,466 km

THEN: (Ernfold, Sask.) This rural town, 68 kilometres east of Swift Current and with a population of 21, is surely the only community in the country that lies in the Trans-Canada Highway.

Ernfold, at the "A" marker, lies between the lanes of the Trans-Canada

Warren Beach has lived here almost all his 55 years. He remembers when the road was a single two-lane stretch of asphalt, and then when it was twinned in 1973 to become a four-lane highway. But to avoid razing the town that lay to the south of the road, the eastbound two lanes branched way off to the south, as far as three kilometres away from the westbound lanes. Much of Warren’s 3,600 acres of ranch land lies between the opposing lanes of highway, as does the town itself.

“It makes it kind of novel,” he says. “You think of it as like the railway once was: it was the link of Canada, the lifeline of Canada. That’s what the Trans-Canada is now. We’ve always felt here that we’re kind of close to civilization, and it’s because of that highway. You go 15 miles south of here and you feel you’re in the middle of nowhere, but the Trans-Canada makes you feel less isolated.”

Warren Beach, on the track that used to be the main provincial highway.

Warren took me in his pickup truck along the track that formed the original graded gravel road across the province. It’s the road that Perry Doolittle would have driven in 1925, when he wrote enthusiastically about the gravel and cinders that Saskatchewan spread on the sticky gumbo of its clay highways, and that Alex Macfarlane would have driven in 1946 to win the Todd Medal, before it was replaced in the early 1950s with the construction of the new Trans-Canada.

We spoke for a long time while a prairie storm approached about the decline of western rural communities, and the effect of the railway and later highways on its residents. Ernfold used to be a thriving town of as many as 300 people, but it’s now rundown and without facilities – just a few homes among the boarded-up houses between the Trans-Canada.

“It wasn’t the highway that did that to Ernfold,” says Warren. “The factors that killed this community were in place long before. It was the ongoing development of the West. Technology has changed the way we live. We don’t need communities every nine miles any more. Everything is more centralized now, and it’s centralized in the city – that’s where the heavy capital comes from that services the rural communities. Rural life is changing. But it’s all ongoing; it’s still going on.”

NOW: (Moose Jaw) The 60-kilometre stretch of Trans-Canada between Regina and Moose Jaw was renamed the Highway of Heroes in a ceremony last November. It’s now one of five provinces to honour Canadian soldiers.

Saskatchewan's Highway of Heroes

The most recent was New Brunswick, which decided to give the name to its entire 900 kilometres of TCH earlier this summer. I wrote about it earlier in this journey in this blog post.

However, I still think this cheapens the original Highway of Heroes, which is the 150 kilometres of Highway 401 from the air base at Trenton, Ontario, to the coroner’s office in Toronto. This is the stretch of asphalt along which the hearses travel that contain the bodies of the fallen soldiers who are being delivered home, and people line the road’s bridges to pay their respects whenever a procession passes.

No such thing happens on the TCH in Saskatchewan. Sure, the provincial government stated in a press release for the renaming that both Regina and Moose Jaw “were important bases to the Air Training Program during the Second World War and an active military presence in both cities remains today.” But why not follow Nova Scotia’s example and honour our soldiers by naming the TCH simply as a Veterans’ Highway? This would allow the Ontario portion of road to be accorded the unique recognition it deserves.

The anatomically correct moose

SOMETHING INTERESTING … (Moose Jaw) Tristan and I stopped at the giant moose on the edge of town to find out if it really is anatomically correct. It is, sort of, though nothing that a male moose ought to be too proud of.

While there, we met Jack and Karen from Syracuse, New York. They were holding onto a copy of today’s Regina Leader-Post, in which there was a story about this journey. (I worked at the Leader-Post in the summer of 1988, so it was a little strange to be the person interviewed for the story.) They had driven out to the Pacific on American roads and were now returning along the Canadian highway.

“This is a good road – we’ve got no complaints,” they said. I forgot to ask, though, how they fared in the Banff area, where the Trans-Canada was closed just a few days ago by a mud slide and traffic was stranded on the road overnight.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12 … (Swift Current) Today I realized the true meaning of boredom. Today, I was stuck in the car by myself for about an hour. (Dad’s note: He refused to come along when Warren Beach and I invited him to drive with us to the nearby track that was once the main provincial highway.)

Tristan, growing bored at 110 km/h

All I had was my dad’s iPhone that didn’t have like any good apps on it. I was basically just scanning bar codes on magazines with the scanner app the whole time. I eventually fell asleep for about 10 minutes I think when my dad finally arrived. But other than that, today was pretty ok.

Trans-Canada Trek: Chips and skydives

By Mark Richardson - Monday, July 23, 2012 at 9:03 AM - 0 Comments

Moose Jaw, Saskatechewan – Days 38, 39, 40

Trans-Canada distance: 5,447 km

Actual distance driven: 12,193 km

NOW: (Regina) So much for the high-quality road that Manitoba’s minister of transport, Steve Ashton, told me about this week. Somewhere west of Brandon on the Trans-Canada Highway, a flying rock scored a direct hit on the windshield, scoring a starburst just to the left of my line of sight.

An unwelcome chip

I was passing a truck at the time. The vehicle in front of me was waaaaay in front. There were some loose stones on the road from recent maintenance, but there wasn’t much I could have done to avoid it.

We drove into Regina yesterday and I went looking for a Chip King stand, which I found in the Safeway parking lot. For $55 all in, Taylor Wandler told me he could fix the chip so that it wouldn’t spread and crack the rest of the windshield. The problem is that tiny air bubbles get into the crack and can flex the glass with vibration, or with temperature change, and that can crack the whole thing.

Taylor went at it with a small drill to create a hole for the air to escape, then a suction thingee that pulled the air out. Then he injected resin into the crack to fill the glass so that it was a solid piece again. Took 20 minutes.

Checking out the chip

There’s still an obvious mark on the glass if you look for it, but I’m not worried about it spreading now. And to be realistic, I’ve driven on lots of gravel roads so far with no issues. It’s ironic this should happen on Canada’s national highway.

Chatting with Taylor while he was making the repair, I realized he’s in a pretty good business. His dad has owned the franchise for the last 15 years and Taylor’s sister works for the company too. But think about it: There will always be windshields and there will always be stone chips in them. The price is a fair exchange for the work, and customers don’t leave feeling ripped off – they blame the government, not the repair person. And most important, the business can’t be outsourced. Nobody in India can fix your windshield – you’ve got to be right there on the spot. Pretty good business.

THEN: (Burrows, Sask.) Remember Percy Gomery? I introduced him back in northern Ontario, where he was driving home to Vancouver from Montreal with his long-suffering wife “the Skipper.” When we left them, in 1920, they’d just gotten mired in a bog deep in the woods, wrecked their car, and the Skipper was becoming hysterical. Read the blog here.

I haven’t mentioned him since then because the two of them cut through the States after reaching Sault Ste.-Marie. They came back into Canada south of Winnipeg – where they were stopped for speeding at 65 km/h – and quite enjoyed Manitoba, but found Saskatchewan roads to be abominable.

“Through Moosomin we loped along, over roads which, at their best, gave us something the motion of a prairie wolf, to Wapella, a typical elevator village. Starting next morning early we did a twenty-mile succession of mud-holes, which forcefully suggested to our minds a string of beads, in more senses than one. Though it might be recorded that between Wapella and Whitewood we found the one and only road-construction gang seen during the whole 500-mile drive across Saskatchewan.”

The old Ellis Trail, north of Burrows, Sask.

Every year though, the road was slowly improving. We stayed at the farm of Phyllis and Ewan Armstrong, Maclean’s readers who wrote and offered us a meal, and their property straddles the current Trans-Canada between Wapella and Whitewood. Previous to its construction in the 1950s, the two-lane gravel road lay parallel, just to the north of the highway, and previous to that, in Gomery’s ’20s, the clay road ran parallel to the south through what is now their back yard.

The next morning, Ewan took us four miles north to a track through a field that marks the route of the old Ellis Trail, laid out in the late 19^th century as the road across the prairie. There’s only a placard there now to tell anyone that it ever existed and we found it dug up and bent by vandals. The trail is historic and protected but local farmers want it redesignated as regular agricultural land, so they can plow it in and make use of it as part of their fields. Life goes on.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT … (MOOSE JAW) It’s on a lot of bucket lists, and with my 50^th birthday approaching rapidly, jumping out of an airplane just seemed like a good thing to do. And if I could do it beside the Trans-Canada, out on the limitless prairie, then all the better.

High over Moose Jaw

Tandem diving doesn’t take any special training – just $250, a lot of initials on a waiver form (and a compulsory video to explain the waiver) and 10 minutes of basic information. My tandem instructor, Mark Ehrmantraut, buckled me in and his dive team partner Pablo Moreno volunteered to help shoot video.

Mark and Pablo call themselves the Saskatchewan Provincial Free-flight Champions, though they laugh when they do so. Mark’s got nearly 5,000 jumps to his name and Pablo’s trying to catch up with 700. They love nothing better than hurling themselves from a plane toward the prairie.

“It’s a huge addiction for me,” said Mark, a high school science teacher who made his first jump – a tandem – in 1997. His wife jumped then, too, but she’s only been a couple of times since. She’s busy now as an assistant deputy minister with the department of highways, which seems fitting for this blog.

Mark Ehrmantraut and Pablo Moreno

“Freefall is the adrenaline rush, but now we’re more into the technical side of it. Every time you try something new, a new trick, you get that sense of your first jump. You can’t beat it.”

Pablo, a maintenance worker at the Regina Casino, agreed: “The first time I flew head down, and I was stable, it was awesome. It doesn’t get any better.”

And me? It’s tough to describe in words, except to say the intense rush at the beginning as you plummet from 10,000 feet at 250 km/h is like nothing you can feel on the ground. Then when the instructor opens the chute at around 5,000 feet, everything suddenly becomes very calm. You’re not falling – you’re floating, right up until you touch the ground.

Want to see for yourself? Take a look at the video here.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN: Today was an even-out day for me and my dad because he got to go sky-diving but I got to go down the water slide at the hotel like a billion times.

Tristan, about to drop 40 feet

I still think he got the better half of the bargain because he got to go sky-diving but apparently there is a guy in Montreal will take me when I’m 14 so all I have to do is convince my mom that it is safe and I’m ready.

The only problem is that convincing my mom won’t be so easy and I have to wait a year and a bit.

Roadtrips and chickens

By Mark Richardson - Sunday, July 22, 2012 at 5:31 AM - 0 Comments

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Day 37

Trans-Canada distance: 4,808 km

Actual distance driven: 11,351 km

NOW: (Winnipeg) Here in Manitoba, the Trans-Canada Highway is ranked No. 7 on the local CAA’s list of worst roads. It was voted there by CAA members, thanks to ongoing construction and poor road quality.

I have yet to drive west of here, but the road was pretty good east of Winnipeg. And Manitoba’s minister of transport says he’s committed to making it competitive with the U.S. interstate system, which is often the preferred route for commerce from Manitoba to Ontario.

Steve Ashton

“A number of years ago, it was the Trans-Canada in name only – it was a series of provincial highways with little federal support,” says Steve Ashton. “But we’ve been making a significant investment in Manitoba and we’ve had some extra support from the feds … we’re bringing it up to the standard of interstates in the United States.”

The Manitoba border crossing at Emerson, south of Winnipeg, into North Dakota is the busiest crossing west of Windsor, handling more traffic even than the crossing south of Vancouver. This is because trucking in the States is generally easier and cheaper than in Canada, and especially compared to the single lane highway of north-western Ontario.

“You get to the border and you really notice the difference,” says Winnipeg city councillor Jeff Browaty. “They have all the money for it in the States – there are overpasses where we would have traffic lights and intersections. The speed limit is 75 mph, and gas is so much cheaper.”

Jeff Browaty

But both politicians agree the Trans-Canada is an icon – it’s still a highway that’s earned its national pride. Browaty sat in the Camaro and said he’d love to take the drive across the country, to cross it off his bucket list.

Ashton’s already done the drive. As a family of new immigrants from the U.K in 1967, his mom and dad loaded their three sons into the back of a ’64 Buick LeSabre the following year and drove west from Manitoba to Victoria; the next year, they drove east to Toronto.

“I’ll never forget it,” says Ashton, who was 12 years old for the first trip. “There were lots of motels, lots of Mountain Dew and hamburgers. I’ve been to many places around the world since, but those were still some of the most memorable trips I’ve ever taken. I would still list the trip as absolutely iconic.”

THEN: (Winnipeg) I was poking through the archives of the Manitoba CAA and found a newspaper story about a Mr. H.W. White, who won a gold trophy offered by the Vancouver Automobile Club for being the first motorist to drive from Vancouver to Winnipeg under his own power. I’d never heard of H.W. White, and the clipping was not dated, but it was in a scrapbook of items from around the time of the First World War.

H.W. White and his Cadillac

The story told of how White, accompanied by his unnamed wife and daughter, drove a Cadillac down to Seattle then across Washington state before crossing back into Canada from Idaho at Kingsgate. There had been a lot of flooding, and at one point the road followed a trestle bridge over Lake Pen for 4 kilometres where “water was lapping over the planks of the bridge for nearly the whole distance.” Once in Canada, the roads deteriorated and, thanks to a couple of washed-out bridges, the party had to drive on railway tracks for three kilometres with “a solid rock wall of 50 feet high and on the other side a drop of 175 feet.”

They made it to Winnipeg at an average of 25 km/h, and I thought I had a reasonable image of the drive until I read the final paragraph of the lengthy newspaper account. “In addition to the Cadillac car, the party had a Warner trailer truck, or a regular house on wheels, a complete camping outfit, containing 2 bedrooms with full sized beds, springs and mattresses, a dining room and kitchen.” Presumably, this was another venture with an unnamed chauffeur, and maybe more staff, tagging along behind. I’ll be trying to find out more about the Whites when I reach Vancouver.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT … (Winnipeg) My friend Willy Williamson has a thing for cars, and pride of place right now in his garage goes to the Chickenmobile.

Willy and his chickenmobile

It’s a 1959 Ford Thunderbird that he found rotting beside the road a few years ago. It used to be a parade car for the Chicken Delight chain of restaurants, but it spent many years in a barn after the owner tried to destroy it – the tow-truck driver commissioned to take it to the wreckers kept it instead.

Willy and some friends restored it because it seemed the right thing to do, but he isn’t quite sure what to do with it now. We took it on a beer run into town and, of course, it attracted all kinds of honked horns and waves – you just can’t ignore this car.

I suggested we swap cars, so that Tristan and I would drive the Chickenmobile for the rest of the way to the end of the Trans-Canada Highway, and Willy figured it would make it to Victoria and was happy to keep the Camaro, but there’s no roof and practicality won the day. Besides, I’m not sure what General Motors would say about getting a Chickenmobile returned to them at the end of this journey.

Riding the chicken

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Winnipeg) Today I got informed of a great skateboard shop in downtown Winnipeg called Kings. Apparently it was an old movie theatre that was renovated to be a skateboard shop.

I asked my dad if I could go but my dad said that we had been to too many skateboard shops. I thought that was nonsense because you can never go to too many skateboard shops. But my dad figured that since it was on the Trans-Canada we could take a quick visit into the shop.

I bought some new bearings called Bones Precision Swiss bearings and they were about $75 without tax. Hopefully I’ll get wheels soon and my board will be complete.

The last trees and the last rocks

By Mark Richardson - Friday, July 20, 2012 at 7:55 AM - 0 Comments

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Day 36

Trans-Canada distance: 4,797 km

Actual distance driven: 11,269 km

NOW: (Winnipeg) Once you leave Ontario (finally!), the Trans-Canada widens and straightens and splits into four divided lanes all the way across the prairie. It’s fairly easy country for road building, passing through rolling agricultural land.

The most easterly prairie highway trees?

There’s a game you can play, driving either west or east, of looking for the last/first rock and the last/first tree. Before I discovered the prairie, I assumed it’s an immediate thing at the provincial border: that 100 metres to the east of the line there are forests and lakes, and 100 metres to the west, there’s wheat. That’s not the case at all, because there are more than 100 kilometres of woods and water in eastern Manitoba, including Sandilands provincial forest and Whiteshell provincial park.

The rocks end pretty quickly, though: today, I spotted the last outcrop near McMunn, which is about 40 km west of the border, and that was pretty isolated.

The trees took another 100 km or so, ending quite abruptly near Ste. Anne. Sure, there are plenty of trees around, planted in copses by hand to protect farms from the cold winter wind, but it’s noticeable enough that we emerged from the forest and Tristan couldn’t help but exclaim, “Look! We’re on the prairie!”

THEN: I don’t know who won the silk hat in the bet I wrote of yesterday – that’s one of the reasons I’m here now, to poke through archives and discover stuff I can’t find on Google or over the phone. I suspect it was the Ontario minister, for I have a news article from the day that suggests the Ontario stretch of highway to the provincial border was ready before the Manitoba stretch.

The old Ontario road to the Manitoba border, seen today

The road between Winnipeg and Kenora was finally completed in 1932, and this is its 80^th anniversary. The highway was opened officially with a ribbon cutting on July 1 that year, Dominion Day, followed by a “program of sports and entertainment arranged by the two towns of Kenora and Keewatin.”

Manitoba’s minister of public works, W.R. Clubb, was there to represent his province and it must have been a satisfying day for him. Two years earlier, he’d written a guest editorial in the Toronto Mail that declared “a highway joining the east to the west must be a potent factor in establishing and maintaining cordial relationship … The aviator may fly with the swiftness of a falcon from one place to another, but, cut off from all association with his fellow, he flies in the chill isolation of the clouds. Travelling by rail is a very formal affair. The traveller is hurried along by a rigid officialdom whose great aim is to detrain him at a certain destination on the moment of time specified. He has but one choice – the choice of destination.

“The vision of a completed Trans-Canada highway presents to the mind of the motorist many pleasing and educational prospects. He may loiter at will by many a shaded dell or meandering stream; and he may deviate from this broad highway to acquaint himself with strange communities and strange peoples.

“Racial animosities and interprovincial differences – and these are largely due to ignorance on the part of both in regard to the other’s point of view – are being dispelled by a freer intercourse, and, undoubtedly, the construction of the Trans-Canada extension east is another great step towards perfecting our national unity.”

SOMETHING INTERESTING: (Near Winnipeg) Aha! This sign along the Trans-Canada just east of Winnipeg suggests that maybe I was onto something a few days ago when I questioned in this blog post just where the halfway point of the TCH actually lies.

Halfway across

I thought then that we had more distance to travel, although the highway heads north and south for many kilometres in the east: along Newfoundland’s west coast, up through New Brunswick to skirt Maine, and north beside Lake Superior through Wawa, where the halfway point claims to be.

However, although the TCH travels almost to Canada’s easterly point, reaching St. John’s, its western terminus in Victoria falls well short of the most westerly point in the country. Canada’s most westerly community is Eagle Creek in the Yukon, the last stop before the Alaska border which follows the 141^st meridian, while Victoria lies only just past the 123^rd meridian.      

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN: (Kenora) We paid a visit to the local skateboard shop in Kenora, called Board Anyone. I picked up a new pair of Independent (the company that makes the trucks) trucks and hardware.

Diving in, at last

We met up with my dad’s friend Willie and once we arrived at his house I went swimming for about two hours because it was just so nice in the pool and there was a diving board. It was better than a hotel pool because it was deep and you can dive in. Tomorrow we are in Winnipeg for the whole day, so hopefully I can add to my skateboard again.

YouTube, skateboards and a silk hat

By Mark Richardson - Wednesday, July 18, 2012 at 7:11 AM - 0 Comments

Kenora, Ontario – Day 35

Trans-Canada distance: 4,461 + 137  = 4,598km

Actual distance driven: 11,002 km

Mark and Tristan, YouTube stars

NOW: (Kenora) Since we didn’t drive far today, this seems a good time to introduce properly the car that I’m driving on this Trans-Canada Trek. I shot this video at the halfway point of the Trans-Canada Highway just south of Wawa – take a look to see what we’ve done to the Camaro and check out our souvenirs, and find out what Tristan really thinks of the Todd Medal.

THEN: The road linking Ontario to Manitoba was the final provincial road link to be completed in Canada, if you don’t count the islands of PEI or Newfoundland. Like the rest of the prairies, Manitoba was more concerned that its roads should lead to U.S. markets in the south than to eastern Canada. A working rail line was completed in 1882, which was sufficient for moving grain to the silos at Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), so most politicians didn’t give the thought of a road much priority.

Sometime in the 1920s, Ontario’s minister for northern Ontario, James Lyons, bet a silk hat with the Manitoba minister of public works, W.R. Clubb, that his province would be first to complete the road to the provincial border. Considering that Ontario had to finish 50 km of road through rocks and swamp while Manitoba had about 60 km of fairly flat and easy highway to build, it should have been a sure thing. It wasn’t.

Check in here tomorrow to find out what happened.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Dryden) I got an email from the PR guy at General Motors this morning. “Both of your rear tires are a bit low,” he wrote. “You might want to put a bit of air in them.” The GM guy was in Oshawa; the car was parked outside my hotel room in Dryden.

The Chevy Camaro that GM’s provided to me for this cross-Canada drive comes with OnStar, but also with an available app that tells all about what’s going on with the car right on my iPhone. Because the car belongs to GM, I had to use the PR guy’s email to register the app, and he got to check out the vehicle.

“You have just over half a tank of gas,” he went on, showing off now. “Your fuel range is approx. 387 km. You’ve been averaging 11.5 L/100 km on the car.”

I can even lock and unlock the Camaro remotely with my iPhone, and if I should ever want to, I can honk the horn and flash the lights without being inside. Pretty impressive technology that we’ll probably take for granted in another decade.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Kenora) Today was a pretty great day because I went skateboarding at the local skate park in Dryden.

Tristan on a roll

I tried to learn new tricks but it didn’t work out very well – hopefully I’ll get them soon so that I have bragging rights with my dad.

We arrived in Kenora at about 3:30 pm and went to the swimming pool where we soon realized that we had a perfect view of the skate park. I saw a guy on a BMX bike doing a back flip off a jump which I thought was pretty cool. We picked up a pizza and we were done for the night. Today was great.

Trees and more trees, plus a few words of wisdom

By Mark Richardson - Tuesday, July 17, 2012 at 7:36 AM - 0 Comments

Dryden, Ontario – Day 34

Trans-Canada distance: 4,461km

Actual distance driven: 10,840 km

Trees, trees and more trees

NOW: (Dryden) There are two Trans-Canada Highways in this region: the traditional, more direct route 17 that passes through Dryden, and the southern route 11 that stays close to the U.S. border and passes through Fort Frances. I drove Hwy. 11 last year in an RV with the family and it was the most boring 400 km of highway I can recall – and I’ve driven some remote roads. It’s promoted as the “MOM” route, for Manitoba, Ontario, Minnesota, but there are no towns or lakes to break the monotony of flat trees. Too bad, because the road down to it from Kenora through Sioux Narrows, past Lake of the Woods, almost makes up for it. Almost.

This year, I stayed with tradition and we took Hwy. 17 with all the trucks. I think it’s the second most boring 350 km I can recall. It didn’t help that it was pouring rain most of the day, making the few small communities along the way look especially drab.

At least on this route, there was a large sign to remind us that we’re changing time zones. There was no such sign on the other road last year. Nothing. Nada. Nowt. Just trees.

THEN: In 1912, Wilby and Haney put their car onto a train to travel from Thunder Bay to Winnipeg. In 1925, Perry Doolittle put his car back onto the railway tracks to drive the same journey, for there still was no road. But in 1946, on their way to claim the Todd Medal as the first motorists to drive completely across Canada by road, Alex Macfarlane and his friend Ken MacGillivray (the former city editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail) were barreling along the highway in their borrowed Chevy Stylemaster.

The successful drive in 1946

They came in from Geraldton to the north – the last stretch of road to be completed to link the two Canadian coasts. “I would count it a good road easily travelled and free from dangers, except the possibility of dying of lonesomeness,” Macfarlane wrote later.

Just last week, the Canadian Automobile Association, who are my sponsors for this road trip, found Macfarlane’s log book of his “Trans-Canada Motor Trip” buried in their archives and shipped it out to me in Thunder Bay. I’ve been reading his account of the 10-day journey, lost until now.

“From Port Arthur [now Thunder Bay] to Winnipeg, the road is more interesting, but not quite as good,” he reported. “That is understandable because it is much older, and in places heavily travelled. The somewhat mountainous nature of the country too necessitates a multitude of curves, and curves don’t add to the pleasure or safety of driving.”

The “much older” road was built during the Depression mostly as a make-work project. And those mountains and curves no longer exist – they’ve been flattened and smoothed over the years. I’m sure Macfarlane wouldn’t recognize it now.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT … (Thunder Bay) I got chatting with Brett Clibbery at the Starbucks in the Chapters, and he kind of set me straight on a few things.

Brett Clibbery

Tristan had just found a book he wanted to buy that listed all the possible cheats for online games, and Brett offered a sympathetic look when my son went off to pay for it. “Well, at least he’s reading,” I suggested. He agreed, looked at my iPhone and waved his own iPhone. “We’re not much better when you think about it,” he said.

It turns out that Brett is 60, originally from Kenora, but now lives on a sailboat and travels the world. Right now, he’s working for a Thunder Bay company operating charter sail trips in the area, but he’s looking forward to sailing south this winter. “I stay in touch with people with this,” he said, waving the iPhone again. “But it doesn’t replace writing a letter. When was the last time you wrote somebody a letter, with a pencil and paper?”

A long time ago. These days, my hand cramps up after a hundred words or so with a pen because I’m used to keyboards. But e-mails are no replacement for written words put on paper; Brett told me of an e-mail he’d sent not long ago to an old friend he hadn’t seen in years, not since they met as actors playing in Hair in London. “She’s fairly famous now and she gets a lot of e-mail, and she missed it when I sent it,” he said. “So I sat down and wrote her a letter, just a page, telling her what I’ve been doing, and I sent it to her parents’ address. It took a while for her to get it, but then she wrote right back. She was thrilled.”

The friend was Sarah Brightman, well-known for her singing performances in the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, her former husband.

I think I’ll stop blogging for tonight. I have a letter to write.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Dryden) Today was by far the worst day so far because all morning it was pouring with rain so we couldn’t put the top down and I got a bit car sick.

Father and son, bonding in the Camaro

When we finally got to the hotel, the pool was packed full of people so we couldn’t go swimming until right before dinner so we were only in there for like 20 minutes. It’s too bad because it was a great pool.

Tomorrow we arrive in Kenora, our last stop in Ontario. It’s taking forever to leave Ontario.

Hells Angels at Tim’s, and a tall temperature tale

By Mark Richardson - Monday, July 16, 2012 at 7:09 AM - 0 Comments

Thunder Bay, Ontario – Days 32 and 33

Trans-Canada distance: 4,112 km

Actual distance driven: 10,453 km

Terry Fox memorial

NOW:  (Thunder Bay) Tristan and I stopped at the memorial to Terry Fox that’s just east of town. We came here last year in an RV and the statue was no less impressive this summer and just as inspiring.

More than $600 million has been raised to combat cancer by Terry Fox runs since his death in 1980. The idea inspires many others to push their limits across Canada, including a couple of pairs of cyclists I met in Newfoundland. But the idea is also running its fund-raising course: this recent Maclean’s article tells about the glut of people cycling across the country and the hard time they have to get any attention.

Hirotaka Suzuki

And then there’s Hirotaka Suzuki, a 27-year-old chemical engineer from Japan who’s walking from Vancouver to Toronto just, well, because. “If this journey is a success, I won’t get any money, but I will get to Toronto,” he told me in uncertain English. After Toronto, he’d like to go to the Caribbean for the winter, or maybe South America, just to see what’s there.

An OPP cruiser pulled up as I was talking with Hirotaka beside the road, about 20 km east of Nipigon. The cop just wanted to check everything was OK. When I told him about Hirotaka’s long walk, the officer laughed good-naturedly: “I know – he’s crazy!”

The cop was probably happy he hadn’t been called over to Thunder Bay, where half-a-dozen cruisers and blacked-out SUVs were setting up shop on the highway beneath the Terry Fox memorial when we passed by later.

Some Hell's Angels at the local Tim's

They were almost certainly there to intercept a small group of about a dozen Hell’s Angels who we met in Nipigon, all of us ordering coffee and iced lemonades and sandwiches at the local Tim Hortons.

Far be it for me to tell the cops how to go about their business, but if they’d wanted to be absolutely certain of stopping the Angels as they headed west, they could have put a roadblock at Shuniah, a short distance east along the Trans-Canada Highway. This is where Terry Fox was forced to end his Marathon of Hope, and as best I can tell from any maps, the 2.8 kilometres of TCH between Nelson Road and the road down to Sleeping Giant provincial park is the only point in Canada where there is no alternative road. If you want to cross the country, you have no choice but to drive on that stretch of highway.

THEN: (Neys) There was no road anywhere near the current Trans-Canada in World War II, although the gravel highway between Hearst and Geraldton, roughly 100 km to the north, was constructed in 1943. This provided the final link between east and west; once it was complete, it was possible to drive across Canada without going into the United States.

Brig. Alex Macfarlane and his friend Ken MacGillivray were the first people to make the successful crossing, in 1946, and Macfarlane earned the Todd Medal for doing so. I’ll tell more about them tomorrow, but here’s an introduction.

These rocks in the shape of a star formed a flagpole base.

This isolation made the area an excellent place for holding prisoners of war, and the provincial park at Neys is built on an old POW camp site. There’s very little to show that up to 500 Germans were once incarcerated here, except for a few concrete foundations in the woods and a star of rocks where the flagpole used to stand.

There were escape attempts, but if they weren’t caught, the prisoners would always return after a day or so, bitten by blackflies and exhausted from getting lost in the bush. One German officer even tried to skate across Lake Superior on boot blades fashioned from an old bedstead, but he soon returned like the others. Camp life was fairly relaxed, after all, and the prisoners were well taken care of. Most escape attempts happened once the war was over and the Germans didn’t want to be returned to Europe. Some even settled later in the area.

The curator at Neys provincial park, Teddy Dong, is looking for people who may have memories of the camp to record a verbal history. If you can help, send him a note at teddy.dong@rogers.com.

Coldest in Canada?

SOMETHING DIFFERENT … (White River) This town used to hold the record for the coldest temperature ever recorded in Canada: 72-below Fahrenheit in 1935. That’s 58-below in Celcius, which is way too cold to think about.

The super-frozen temperature was spotted by 14-year-old Walter Spadoni, when he saw the reading on the thermometer at Rumsey’s General Store while on his way to school. School was cancelled that day.

Walter’s still in White River and I found him at the Home Hardware that his dad founded as a general store in 1905. “Winter’s not what it used to be – it’s a lot warmer,” he told me. “Our roads weren’t plowed, either, but we didn’t have cars, so it didn’t matter.” White River was a bustling railway town but didn’t get a road into the community until 1960, when Walter says he bought himself a Chevrolet to reach the outside world.

Walter Spadoni today

But town residents now question the lowest-temperature claim. “It’s an urban legend,” says Deb Duplassie. “It was cold enough to break the thermometer, and the mercury dropped to the bottom. We get our share of minus-30s and minus-40s, when it’s cold enough to freeze your nose hairs, but who knows what the temperature really was that day?”

And even if it were true, a reliable temperature was recorded of minus-81 Fahrenheit (minus-62.8 C) in the Yukon in 1947, disallowing the title. But White River doesn’t need it. Now it promotes itself as the birthplace of Winnie the Pooh – the railway stop where a bear cub was bought in 1914, named Winnie after Winnipeg, and taken to the London Zoo to become an inspiration for children’s author A.A. Milne and his son Robin. Which apparently is a surprise to most visitors, who assume Winnie the Pooh was created by Walt Disney.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12 (Ouimet Canyon) Today was the most fun out of all the days so far because for the first time I actually got a good night’s sleep.

Riding the wire

Also, we went zip-lining, which was just about the most fun thing I’ve done in my life –  it wasn’t scary at all. It was actually quite nice because there was a light breeze on your face and the beautiful scenery of the canyon.

Now we get to sleep in a Best Western with two separate rooms, one for just watching TV and relaxing and the other for sleeping and doing even more relaxing.

Overall, today was the best day of the trip and I don’t think that anywhere else can beat it, so good luck anyone who is up for the challenge.

Black bears at the dump, and the missing Trans-Canada link

By Mark Richardson - Saturday, July 14, 2012 at 5:50 PM - 0 Comments

Wawa, Ontario

Trans-Canada distance: 3,638 km

Actual distance driven: 9,851 km

NOW:  (Wawa) This town is famous for its giant goose, but there are actually three: the original steel and concrete statue didn’t weather well after it was installed beside the highway in 1960; it was replaced three years later by the current, much lighter iron goose that is also now showing its age. And there’s a smaller goose on the roof of the Wawa Motor Inn.

The original Wawa goose

The goose was intended to draw attention to the community, which is bypassed by the Trans-Canada, lying two kilometres east of the highway. It was criticized as “pregnant” and foolish, but succeeded admirably.

That original 9-metre-tall goose was moved to a couple of other locations before it was bought in 2000 by Anita Young for her General Store in town. After careful restoration, two forklifts drove it carefully up the road to her property, one driving backwards, the other forwards, balancing the 70-tonne goose carefully between their tines. “It’s a piece of our history – I couldn’t just let it go,” she says.

Both giant geese still pull in the tourists. They’re advertised on roadside billboards for literally hundreds of kilometres – I saw one sign for Wawa outside Mattawa on the TCH, 722 kilometres east of here.

THEN: (Wawa) The 100-km stretch of highway south of here to Montreal River was one of the final pieces of road to be completed on the Trans-Canada Highway, not finished until 1960. Before then, motorists had to drive the much more northern route through Kapuskasing if they wanted to stay in Canada on the road west or, more likely, head through the States.

Edward Nyman, centre, speaks for the four trekkers in Sault Ste.-Marie in 1951.

There was a road built during the Depression from Sault Ste.Marie north, but it stopped at Montreal River; politicians kept promising to complete it if elected, but never did. Wawa relied on the railway for its connection to the outside world, So in 1951, local merchants organized “Operation Michipicoten” to draw attention to their plight; the merchants were headed by Al Turcott, who later dreamed up the Wawa Goose. Four men walked the hundred kilometres through the bush to Montreal River to prove that if they could do it, surely a road could be built. The trek took about 10 days.

One of those men was Edward Nyman, who I met today at the Seniors’ Drop Inn Centre. He remembered the long walk very well.

“I was only 17 or so, and Mr. Turcott talked me into it. He was a great bull-shitter. We had a radio and supplies were dropped in by a plane, but it really wasn’t difficult. We could have done it much more quickly, but Turcott wanted the publicity so we took our time and went slowly.

Edward Nyman

“We didn’t have a tent, or a tarp – just sleeping bags. It was September, so there were no bugs, but they wouldn’t have bothered us anyway. We were used to the bush.”

Once again, all the politicians at the group’s reception dinner agreed to build a road if elected, though it took nine more years before the highway was eventually completed.

Is the town better for the road? Edward’s not so sure.

“We used to more or less trust anybody. Nobody had locks on their doors,” he said. “These days, everybody has locks.”

That’s progress for you. He reminded me of Lloyd Adams in Newfoundland, who surveyed the highway through the bush in the 1950s. ““Now we have a four-lane highway and it only takes 45 minutes to get to Wal-Mart,” Lloyd told me then. “I guess that’s progress.”

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: (Wawa)

At Jim’s barber shop, where we had our hair cut, the talk was about the black bear that was chased off the roof of the Canadian Tire store earlier this week. Bears are more of a nuisance here than ever before, and many locals blame the provincial government’s cancellation of the spring bear hunt.

They also resent that neither the Ministry of Natural Resources nor the OPP will come and deal with any bear that’s rooting through garbage. One guy waiting for a haircut said he had to chase away a 400 lb. bear from his neighbour’s porch this week with a slingshot and one of his young daughter’s marbles.

Bears at the dump

“The dump’s the worst place for bears,” said Jim. “I was told there were 16 there earlier today. We’ve run out of space for our garbage so we just pile it on top of the old garbage and it gets higher and higher, and the bears come and help themselves.”

Tristan’s ears pricked up beneath the scissors and he looked at me imploringly. The 12-year-old in me felt the same way. “Where’s the dump?” I asked.

It was closed and empty when we arrived a half-hour later – well, empty of humans anyway. There were at least five large black bears and a flock of birds rooting through a fresh pile of garbage about 100 metres away on the other side of the closed, flimsy gate.

I may not have seen any moose in Newfoundland (though I came close here), but these bears made up for it. Now there’s a tourist idea for Wawa. If people will travel all the way to Moosonee to see polar bears at the dump, surely they’ll drive three kilometres off the Trans-Canada to see black bears. Except then they’ll get a bit too close, and next thing you know …

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Wawa)

Tonight we are in Wawa, Ontario. Today we did a lot of things including going to the beach and the water was fabulous! It reminded me of pictures of exotic places like Australia and Hawaii. The water was so clear and the sun was just the right brightness so that it glimmered off the water without blinding you.

Sandy Beach, near Wawa

Every thing was going perfectly until what looked to be a deer fly started to chase us everywhere. It was obviously very well trained because it knew all the spots we couldn’t feel and it could get in and out very quickly.

But overall today was a good day – the weather was great, the people were nice and everything just went perfectly. Tomorrow we hit Marathon!

Day 30: Halfway there? Maybe … maybe not

By Mark Richardson - Friday, July 13, 2012 at 7:26 AM - 0 Comments

Batchawana Bay, Ontario

Trans-Canada distance: 3,481 km

Actual distance driven: 9,643 km

NOW:  (Batchawana Bay, Ont.) The halfway point of the Trans-Canada Highway is officially here, about 50 kilometres north of Sault Ste.-Marie. Tristan and I swung the Camaro into the picnic area that marks the point beside the Chippewa River, and we shot a video to commemorate the occasion. Now we’re staying at a motel just to the north, but the advertised wifi is so slow that I can’t upload the video. Check back here – I’ll put it up over the weekend.

At the halfway point

I’m not so sure that this is still the halfway point, though. When Walter Stewart crossed the country on the Trans-Canada in 1965, he wrote that the road was 7,714 kilometres long. When I asked the federal Department of Transportation for the highway’s official length, I was told that it’s “about 8,000 kilometres,” which I think they just took from Wikipedia. But I’ve been keeping a pretty careful eye on distances, and if my current reading of 3,481 kilometres is accurate, then this point is well short.

The truth is the highway is evolving, being straightened and smoothed and bypassing cities. Perhaps the Trans-Canada just isn’t as long as it used to be, or perhaps my distance logs are hopelessly flawed. It’s difficult to believe, after all, that the Trans-Canada is a thousand kilometres shorter than it once was. I guess I’ll know better once I get to Mile One in Victoria.

THEN: (Sault Ste.-Marie) This was the final stop for both Wilby and Haney in 1912, and Dr. Perry Doolittle in 1925, before giving up on the road across Canada for a while. There was just no road north of Sault Ste.-Marie that led around Lake Superior, though construction was pressing ahead in ’25 and Doolittle drove a few kilometres to the end of the road before turning back for the Soo.

Riding the rails north of the Soo

In 1912, Wilby and Haney loaded their REO onto a schooner across the lake for Fort William, now part of Thunder Bay; in 1925, Doolittle swapped the wheels on his Model-T Ford for metal train wheels and took to the railroad tracks, registered as a special train to coordinate with the regular locomotives.

I’ll be attaching an excerpt from the 1925 movie of the drive north on the tracks, but I can’t do it today – the wifi is too slow here to upload movies. Check back here over the weekend, but in the meantime, here’s a movie already up of the Model-T practising for the train tracks at Quebec City.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT …  (Bruce Mines) The Simpson copper mine shaft only operated for one year, from 1846-1847, but that didn’t deter the small town of Bruce Mines from opening it to the public.

The old Simpson copper mine

The problem is that the public doesn’t know.

“You’re the first tour we’ve given today, and we didn’t have anybody yesterday,” said Jenna Thompson, a university student from the town hired as a guide for the summer. “Lots of people tell us we should have better signs. Tops, we have maybe four tours a day.”

It’s an interesting and well-informed tour, though the shaft is more of a four-metre-deep trench than a traditional mine. On the second week of this drive from St. John’s, I stopped at a coal mine outside Springhill, Nova Scotia, and there I walked with a guide for a hundred metres or so into the wet ground. When he shut the door and turned out the lights, the blackness was absolute, darker than anything I’ve ever experienced. After just a few minutes in such darkness, people become disoriented, dizzy, nauseous and fall to the floor. It was astonishing.

But the copper mine here was still a worthwhile visit, down into the coolness of the rock. It was opened for tours in 1992 but closed the last couple of years; this is the first summer it’s reopened. Take a look at its Facebook page if you want to know a bit more (though it’s still being built), or stop in next time you drive through town – if you can see the signs to find it.

The start of a fancy board

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Sault Ste.-Marie ) Today I reached the first step of my goal for this journey. My plan is to visit various skateboard shops across the country and construct my first completely custom skateboard.

I started off today by purchasing a skateboard deck at the West 49 in Sault Ste.-Marie. It is made by the company Almost, and is the Rodney Mullen version – he’s a famous skateboarder.

It is lightweight, durable, and almost (that is an unintentional pun) the same dimensions as my old board, so it will be easy to get used to. I can’t wait for the whole thing to be done!

Day 29 – Disappearing industry beside the Trans-Canada, and Elliot Lake

By Mark Richardson - Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 7:41 AM - 0 Comments

Blind River, Ontario

Trans-Canada distance: 3,278 km 

Actual distance driven: 9,405 km

Our Sudbury inukshuk

NOW: (Sudbury) The Trans-Canada Highway used to run right through downtown Sudbury, but a major bypass was completed in 1995 to keep heavy traffic away to the south.

It cuts – literally – through the rocks of Daisy Lake Uplands Provincial Park, and there are cars parked on the hard shoulders where their drivers find easy access into the park. Tristan and I paused at a safe spot and climbed up onto a rock cut above the highway.

We built an inukshuk there, like many others before us. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

*

Later in the day, we took a side trip to Elliot Lake to find ice cream. The Dairy Queen is behind the mall, and we paused to look at the makeshift memorial and flowers left for the victims of the collapsed shopping centre.

This is a reminder, I told Tristan, that it’s important to live life to the fullest – as every day could be your last. You never know when your final day will come. If there’s just one lesson I want to teach him, it would be that.

Somewhere in Northern Ontario, 1912

THEN: (Cutler, Ont.) In 1912, Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney were meeting problem upon problem in trying to drive across the province, let alone across the whole country.

They twisted the driveshaft of their REO car twice in two days, pulling it from sand on hills south of North Bay. The second time it happened, they limped into the next town and Haney, the driver and mechanic, found tools to straighten it. But when they made it to North Bay, in a time without highway maps, they learned there was not yet any road going through to Sudbury and they finally gave up. For the first time, they took the car off the road and put it on a train. The two followed separately, on different trains, taking a welcome break from each other.

It would be the start of many kilometres of non-road travel for the car. After meeting up the next day in Sudbury, the two pathfinders drove south toward the lake but found another lack of roads at Cutler, where Haney wrote that they had “great sport” putting the REO on a tugboat that linked the towns of Lake Huron’s North Channel above Manitoulin Island, shipping it here to Blind River.

The site of the old dock at Cutler

There’s no trace any more of the dock at Cutler, which is part of the Serpent River First Nation. I met Bill McLeod at his house near the water and he told me that local transport shipping ended in the 1950s when the Trans-Canada linked the shoreline’s communities by land. The water is difficult to navigate, anyway – too many deadhead logs lying just under the surface. But he told me where the dock had been, and how to find it.

Tristan and I drove over to the old site, near a public park and the band’s war memorial. We skipped rocks for a while; nothing whatsoever remained to suggest that less than a hundred years ago, mighty boats once docked there and the place bustled with industry. Nothing whatsoever.

Not just any limo

SOMETHING DIFFERENT … (Sturgeon Falls, Ont.) Oscar Parent says he gets at least a couple of dozen carloads of people stopping every day to look at his stretched 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. “On Sundays, the parking lot is full, full, full,” he adds. “It doesn’t sell a lot of cars, but it sure attracts attention.”

It’s parked out front at his auto sales lot beside the Trans-Canada, which he started after moving up here six years ago to retire. But he’s too busy to retire, which is why he doesn’t drive the car anymore. “I don’t want to use up my weekends with weddings anymore – I had too many years of that.”

Oscar was a high school auto mechanics teacher in Hamilton when he saw Paul Newman drive up to the Oscars in a stretched Beetle, and he knew he had to build a car just like it. That was about 15 years ago he thinks, pausing a long time to remember. Originally, he built three, but the other two were shorter and he sold them and doesn’t know their fate.

Oscar Parent, living in style

A casino from Las Vegas wanted to buy the Beetle limo but at the time it wasn’t for sale and he turned the offer down. Now, though, he’d just as soon sell it and figures it’s worth $40,000 with its new souped-up engine. His son drove it last week to his prom and had lots of space for his friends – it seats 10 in the back.

“He’s going to college and wants to join the OPP,” says Parent. Hopefully, the future officer will never have to write a ticket against the future driver of his prom night Beetle.

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN, 12: (Sudbury) Today was nerve-racking for me because I had my first interview with a TV show (two different shows, actually). We went to the CAA office at Sudbury so that my dad could meet up with the TV guys for his interview – little did I know that I was going to be interviewed as well.

Fame for Tristan

First it was the guys from the local Sudbury news, so I thought that I’d only be the laughing stock in Sudbury. Then the lady from CTV interviewed me, so I thought the whole province would be against me. But once they started to ask me questions, I didn’t feel so nervous. They asked what I was most looking forward to and I told them I want to see Alberta. They asked me if I was worried about anything, and I told them about listening to my dad’s iPod and his bad taste in music.

Afterwards, we had to film like a BILLION takes of me and my dad driving up and down this side street behind the strip mall at which it took place. But eventually they got what they needed and we were off again.

Tonight we are staying at a very nice motel in Blind River. Tomorrow we head for Wawa!

10 ways to turn a drive into a road trip

By Mark Richardson - Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at 8:47 AM - 0 Comments

North Bay, Ontario

Trans-Canada distance: 2,978 km

Actual distance driven: 8,987 km

NOW: (North Bay, Ont.) I returned home to Cobourg after reaching Sudbury last week along Hwy. 17, as described in my last blog entry. Now, I’m back in Northern Ontario after driving the other Trans-Canada that leads from Ottawa to Peterborough and then up through Orillia. Confused? I explained it in a blog entry here.

Mark and Tristan

I’m driving now for the rest of this journey all the way to the Pacific with my 12-year-old son Tristan. His older brother has already been on his road trips with Dad and now is more interested in music concerts and teenage friends, but Tristan’s pumped for this trip. We travel well together: here’s a story I wrote earlier this year for the Toronto Star about a motorcycle ride we took a couple of summers ago to the top of Mount Washington. I’m proud of this story: “The lure of the classic road trip.” It’s the last piece I wrote in the Star as the editor of its Wheels section.

You didn’t click on the link? Here’s some of what you’re missing – my 10 ways to make a road trip memorable. I’ve already done all these on the drive here from St. John’s, but now with Tristan along, I’ll be doing them all again.

Ten ways to turn a drive into a road trip

There are a few rules to ensure the success of any good road trip:

1. You must drive for a while on a road you’ve never driven on before;

2. You must stop for a coffee or for lunch at a place you’ve never stopped before;

3. You must travel in both darkness and light, so either leave at dawn or arrive after dusk;

4a. You must have an alternative, easier or quicker route that you do not take; or

4b. You must have been able to take transit or fly, but chose not to; and

5. You can drive fast, but you must not hurry.

Those elements alone will turn a drive into a good road trip. They ensure a bit of adventurous exploration while also offering some sort of challenge. You don’t have to go far; you can drive away now and return this evening with a sense of accomplishment. This is one welcome occasion when length doesn’t matter.

But do you want a great road trip? Then you also need as many as possible of these:

6. You must cross water, preferably by ferry;

7. You must face some form of adversity, like a flat tire or heavy rain;

8. You must discover something about yourself, such as finding a relative in a graveyard, or fixing a breakdown on your own;

9. You must be surprised by something;

10. You must share at least some of the journey with somebody else.

THEN: (Scotia, Ont.) In 1912, journalist Thomas Wilby and driver Jack Haney were roughly one-third of the way into their pioneering Halifax-to-Victoria drive when they came through here, and already, the road trip was not going well.

Stuck in Scotia

“One poor devil does all the work, ‘that’s me’” wrote Haney in his diary. “I am hooked up with about the worst companion that possibly could be. The work is going to be hard after leaving Toronto, and not having a MAN with me, I don’t know how I’ll make out.”

Phew! Poor Haney, the 23-year-old head mechanic supplied by the REO car company to drive Wilby across the country in his sponsored car, was venting about the snobbish attitude of the 45-year-old English writer. You can jump ahead to read the capsule story of their drive here, or follow along now with me. If you want to catch up, I first introduced Wilby and Haney back in Halifax in this blog.

The pair were stuck for a day after their car was bogged down on a sandy hill, where a team of horses pulled them out with such heaving and jerking that the driveshaft twisted and had to be replaced by another shipped up by train. After Haney installed it – for Wilby didn’t like to get his hands dirty, especially not with work intended for the lower classes – they became stuck well outside of town on “a high hill with about a 40 per cent grade and a ruddy, slippery surface.” Bear in mind that few public roads these days have grades of more than about 15 per cent, and on the Trans-Canada, the grades are no more than 5 per cent. As Haney described it: “If this was a hill, I had never seen one before; it looked more like a patent fire escape.”

In winching themselves laboriously out of the sand, the driveshaft twisted again and the car eventually limped in low gear to a farmhouse near Trout Creek. “Wilby is pretty sore about the delay, is almost ready to give up,” wrote Haney in his diary that night. “The trip is a farce anyway.”

So what happened next? I’ll tell you tomorrow…

SOMETHING DIFFERENT … (Scotia) Tristan and I drove all over this area trying to find the original site of the steep sandy hill that waylaid the pathfinder drivers in 1912. Scotia is still a small community and one of its two railways is now a trail, and we could never be quite sure we’d located the right spot, and then we found this farm on a side road, well away from the main highway.

Telling it like it is

“It’s been Cow Shit Valley for 20, 25 years,” says owner Carl Marshall. “Everybody kept calling it that, so I figured I should put a sign up. I would say at least 50 people every year stop and take a picture of the sign. I’ll be working away and then I’ll see a car stopped and some people standing next to the sign, and then they’ll drive away. They’re taking photos. That’s okay.”

Carl sells top soil and his trucks have “C.S Valley Farms” written on their doors – a nod to the good business practice of not offending potential customers.

There were some complaints a number of years ago, he recalls, but they didn’t amount to anything. “If somebody wants to come up from the city and complain about my sign, well, tough.”

Carl’s family came to the area in 1868, walking the 70 kilometres north from the station at Gravenhurst to settle the 100 acres they were promised by the government. And that For Sale sign? Cow Shit Valley isn’t really for sale. Carl had put the sign on a friend’s bulldozer as a joke a few weeks ago, and the friend put it in turn on the farm sign. “I’ll never sell,” says Carl. No shit.

My accomplice, blogging

SOMETHING FROM TRISTAN: (North Bay) Today was my first day on the trek and my dad’s 28th!

We started off our journey across this wonderful nation by driving from Cobourg all the way to North Bay. First we drove up to Peterborough so that we could enter the Trans-Canada Highway to start our trek. We passed many towns and eventually made our first and only stop on our first leg of the trip. We stopped in a little town called Scotia which is just north of Huntsville.

We stopped because apparently back in 1912 the first people to trek across the country crashed and got stuck so my dad tried to find the place. On the three or four hour long journey to find it, we stumbled across a place called Cow Poop Valley Farms. Me and my dad laughed but there was a down side to that little chuckle – since my dad is a reporter, he just has to go knock on everyone’s door and ask questions about this farm.

The worst part is since my dad has no sense of fashion he walks around in his white reeboks, socks, shorts, grey hair (even though he prefers the term California blonde), and what he calls a tilly hat. So basically he looks like the stereotypical old person. But aside from that, today’s leg of the journey was fun and exciting. I CAN’T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW! =P

Day 27 – New life and death on the Trans-Canada – and getting stuck

By Mark Richardson - Friday, July 6, 2012 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments

Sudbury, Ontario

Trans-Canada distance: 3,108 km

Actual distance driven: 7,840 km

THEN: (Deux Rivieres) Percy Gomery and his wife “the Skipper,” who I introduced in yesterday’s blog, left in late June, 1920, after a sleepless night in Rapides des Joachims, to drive north to Mattawa.

Percy Gomery and 'the Skipper'

The journey started well but quickly deteriorated as the road became more primitive. I’ll let Gomery explain from his book about the drive, A Motor Scamper ‘Cross Canada:

As the world is said to grow more giddy and dangerous with the declining sun, that execrable road did the same. For miles together it was just a succession of hidden mines into which the car plunged every few yards. Rank growth of years of grass hid both the pits and the huge rocks that threatened to tear the in’ards out of the engine if it was moving more than about two miles an hour.  As it was, the car was buffeted about brutally and so frequently was something being bent or smashed that it ceased to be a matter of comment. Then would come an awful hill, a sort of precipice cut into broad steps on which were strewn boulders about the size of perambulators. Now and then we would gain a height from which we could look a mile or two ahead over a peopleless wilderness of foliage, with just the suggestion of a different shade of green showing where once a road clearing had been made.

“Is that where we’ve got to go?” the Skipper would groan…

After dodging fallen trees, raising others and repairing bridges, I miscalculated the height of a suspended trunk and the car top was torn off. The only thing in our favour was the weather and, about five o’clock, it commenced to rain. We cast longing eyes at a rather homey boarding house at Deux Rivieres station (the first hamlet in twenty-five miles), but decided to push on for Mattawa.

Gomery and his Maxwell touring car

Immediately away from the houses, we passed into the woods again, there being no habitations or buildings whatever for fifteen miles. However, several miles along, the wheels dug their way into hopeless mire and insisted on calling it a day. I think a shovel would have saved us that night, but it was missing from our kit.

Sadly, we fished out the very necessaries, including the typewriter, and left our desolated little home with its broken running board, broken spring, broken lamps, flattened gas-tank, bent windshield and smashed top to the mercy of the rain and started back for Deux Rivieres. Our arms were full of parcels; it was wet and hot; the mosquitoes were eating us alive and we were desperately tired. Several times the Skipper became hysterical. I comforted her as well as I could; in fact I recall telling her how these hardships could only make us better pals…

Believe it or not, the drive grew even worse the next day when they tackled the road again and Gomery ended up abandoning his long-suffering wife to the bears while he sought help again from a swamp. Somehow, though, they made it through and drove all the way to Vancouver. They even stayed married. Want to read his excellent 1922 book? You can download it here in its entirety for free.

Let's Remember Adam

NOW: (Mattawa) Several times today, I’ve seen billboards beside the road that ask drivers to “Remember Adam.” They commemorate 5-year-old Adam Ranger, who was killed on the Trans-Canada Highway in 2000 outside his home east of Mattawa.

Adam was leaving his school bus and was struck by a pickup truck that didn’t stop, despite it being a clear day and all the emergency lights on the bus clearly flashing and visible for more than 1,500 metres. The pickup driver was convicted two years later of manslaughter, as well as criminal negligence causing death.

According to letsrememberadam.org, there are now more than 30 billboards sponsored by local businesses in northern and eastern Ontario, reminding drivers to stop for school buses.

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The roundabout at Mattawa

The roundabout in Mattawa that links the Trans-Canada with Hwy. 533 is the first I’ve seen on the TCH, and it’s the first to be installed anywhere in Northern Ontario. It was opened at the end of last November to replace a T-junction and has apparently smoothed the flow of traffic considerably. Also, apparently, truckers hate it – it’s a very tight turn for a long tractor-trailer.

The roundabout cost nearly $13 million and left the small downtown area dug up for months. It’s part of an 11-kilometre stretch that’s being repaved and fixed up, but there are mixed feelings about all the roadwork: residents want a smooth road, but there are also plans for a bypass that has merchants worried for their futures.

“We’re not that worried, though,” said one woman who didn’t want to be named here. “It’s not going to happen in our lifetimes. There just isn’t the money for it.”

Logs on the Ottawa River

SOMETHING DIFFERENT … (Deux Rivieres) It’s estimated that up to 16 billion logs were floated down the Ottawa River from 1830 until 1989. Yes – billion, with a “b”. Of those logs, probably five per cent sank en route, which means, in the words of Shane Hogue, “we’re never going to run out of wood.”

Hogue’s Deep River Lumber company is one of several in Ontario that specializes in hauling sunken lumber out of the water. I met him as he tried to fix a leak on his pontoon boat, and his scuba divers and a truck driver waited to get back to work.

Most of the logs at this point in the river were cut after 1945, and lost when the river was flooded then to create the Rapides des Joachims dam just downstream. Shane and his crew locate them with sonar, then the divers go down, search them out with flashlights in the 10-metre deep water, and hook them to a winch on the pontoon boat.

Diving for Lumber

The age of the logs can be told by the hammer stamps by the lumberjacks, says Shane. Sometimes they find really old wood from the 1800s with axe marks in distinctive notch patterns, such as Vs and turtle shapes. If you’re interested, take a look at Hogue’s company website to read all kinds of fascinating stories about the old lumberjacks.

Lumber salvage needs a government permit to make sure that the removal of the logs won’t affect the river. Ontario charges a stumpage fee of $27 per cubic metre, but Quebec is just happy to have the logs taken from the river bed and charges nothing, so Shane’s crew works on the Quebec side of the river. It’s expensive to remove the logs, though, and not everybody will pay the premium that must be charged for high-quality salvaged wood to cover its costs.

And in the wintertime, when the river is frozen – what happens then? “I have new twins,” says Shane. “In the wintertime, I’m Daddy Day Care.”