I’m really letting the moss grow under my feet regarding our recent summer road trip. We’ve been home for 2-1/2 months now and I still haven’t shared our other great adventure from that holiday.
You’ve already been entertained (I hope!) by my harrowing tale of “I know precisely how far I can go on a tank of gas”. Well now I do, is the upshot of that little mis-adventure.
“Gas Gauge Blues” occurred on the way to Winnipeg. As much as anyone might think that was all the (mis)adventure one trip should accommodate…wait, there’s more!
Let me begin with a seemingly unrelated statement; over the years I’ve come to realize that I’m likely a lot less mechanically inclined than I ever really was (am).
Believe it or not, the adventure I’m about to relay to you brings back memories of a particular book that I referred to often in my late teens, “How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat (sik) Idiot” by John Muir. It was a bible of sorts to me, and I really believe it kept me sane on numerous occasions; those times when all I really needed was a simple diagram to tell me which engine cylinder was number 1, or which wheel brake cylinder one bleeds first, or what is the correct spark plug gap.
You see, I was a compleat (appropriate, n’est pas?) car nut in my teens. Maybe to say I wasn’t as mechanically inclined as I’d wanted to be is a bit harsh; perhaps it’s more that I didn’t have enough patience to thoroughly learn a task before jumping right in. Nonetheless, I really knew how to frustrate myself on a regular basis. I had several manuals to assist me with my 1962 Beetle, bought very much used (and abused) in 1984 during high school.
I bought my first copy of The Guide for this ’62 project. It had a spiral wire binding (the book, not the car). I couldn’t find it while preparing for this article, although I may still have it; it would be very grease-stained, and perhaps missing a few pages. My second copy of “The Manual” is the 34th printing, dated April 1988, almost new when I was in high school. My two copies of this faithful tome assisted me many a dark night (aren’t those always the times an old VW breaks down?) with subsequent ’72, ’69, ’65 (Notchback), ’55 (Kombi), and ’64 convertible (my favourite thus far, btw) models.
Most mechanics’ manuals were too technical, or I was too impatient, or both. I drifted toward my favourite, the aforementioned Idiots’ Guide for my lion’s share of information. The illustrations drew me in (pun intended) as well. I’ve always considered myself somewhat artistic, although again, I’ve been too impatient to really apply myself to drawing. I used to sketch cars and trucks as a kid. But the cartoon style illustrations in the Idiots’ Guide (drawn by Peter Aschwanden) were definitely an attraction within themselves. Their ultra-detailed style reminded me of the Doodle Art posters I’d coloured with felt pens as a kid.
So, long-windedly, that brings me back to the memory that was forefront in my mind as we (my wife and I) experienced the second adventure of our summer road trip from Vancouver to Winnipeg, and back again, this past summer.
We had split up the return trip a bit differently. We were to attend Shauna’s cousin’s wedding on our return, thus breaking up our driving time. Usually such a trip requires approximately 24 hours of total driving time; either two 12 hour marathons, or three more sane 8 hour days. This time however, we drove about 6 hours from Winnipeg to Regina for the wedding, and stayed there a couple of days before carrying on to what we thought would be Calgary.
Our first mis-calculation occurred when we decided that we could actually travel further than Calgary; say Golden, BC. Our second mis-calculation was in leaving the hotel parking lot at 9 a.m. instead of 7. And the third mis-calculation revolved around having been driving on flat prairie roads for the previous two weeks. We (meaning me) had become unaccustomed to winding two-lane highways through the mountains, at dusk, in the rain. How soon we (and again, meaning me) forget.
Oh, and plus…the temperature plunged from a 3:37 p.m. high of 37oC (photo-documented for proof) in Medicine Hat, to an evening low of 11oC in Field, BC.
Yes, Field, BC. How is it we’d know with such accuracy what temperature it was in Field, BC, on that fateful late august evening, you might ask? Hmm, now therein lies a humdinger of a travel story.
From Regina, via Medicine Hat, we arrived in Calgary around dinner time, and for some reason we were at odds with each as to what to do about dinner. And as I tend to be more motivated by food than my better half, I wanted to go to a real sit-down restaurant for dinner, although honestly neither one of us were hungry enough due to afternoon snacking in Medicine Hat (who knew Timmy Ho’s had hard ice cream?). I topped up the gas tank, spilling gas on my sandal in the process. Events were definitely starting to snowball out of our favour.
We hit the road again after I’d changed from sandals to socks and shoes (in the end, a good idea). Out of Calgary, through the foothills, past Kananaskis, we finally decided to grab a bite to eat in Canmore. Sounded like a logical place to get some fast food and get back on the road quickly. Not quite a NASCAR pit-stop, but similar intent.
However…I mis-read the highway sign and took one off-ramp too soon. And do you think we could find the ruddy McDonald’s? Mein Gott im Himmel, where did they hide the McDonald’s in Canmore?! After several time-wasting laps of this small tourist town (although certainly not to suggest that Canmore is a waste of time in any way; we were simply pressed for daylight at that point), we dashed into A&W for a bite, then back on the road.
The weather was getting increasingly wetter and colder, the skies darker, and the highway narrower. (Welcome back to our 2011 BC summer!) With every passing third-of-an-hour we were getting more concerned. Although, to be perfectly honest, had it been a clear summer evening, which is what we’d been expecting (didn’t really pay attention to the weather forecast the previous evening), a drive after dark wouldn’t have been too bad. Darkness on its own doesn’t necessarily portend a bad trip. Prior to our arrival in Winnipeg Shauna drove the last portion of the trip from the US border to Winnipeg. That drive had taken a lot longer than expected due to road work and nightfall, but Shauna was reasonably familiar with the route, having grown up in that region, and it wasn’t raining. Thus, darkness really wasn’t a problem.
However, our westward tack was now combining nightfall, cloud cover (no moon), rain, streaks on the windshield from oily roadspray, lots of approaching semi-trailer trucks whose headlights were starting to cause increasing consternation due to the streaky windscreen, poorly marked road construction, numerous curves in the road, 2-lane traffic, and over-exertion on our parts from having bitten off more than we could chew in terms of driving distance. We’d already been on the road 12 hours at that point. To say the least, the atmosphere within the passenger cabin was tense at that point.
So…how did we end up in Field, BC you ask, and what on earth does this have to do with an air-cooled Volkswagen repair manual? Especially since we drive a modern Mazda?
I remember fondly from one of the first times I thumbed through a copy of “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive”, one of the illustrations in particular caught my eye. It was a sketched scene in which many Volkswagens were parked at a highway rest stop area, most with zzz’s emanating from the cars’ interiors.
I think the rest stop design is more of a US highway scene than Canadian. I’ve driven from Vancouver to Seattle many times, beginning in my late teens when I’d attended VW shows in Seattle in the summers. I was well acquainted with these rest stops as these would be the areas we’d pull into to let slower cars in our VW mini-convoys catch up. In those years we tended to make the trip in groups of like-minded car owners.
Back to Field; as more kilometres passed, I was starting to internally scroll through our options. Although (ironically) we had a reservation for a motel with a pool in Golden, I was becoming increasingly aware that we weren’t going to get the chance to use it, at least not unless the rain stopped and the roads dried up a bit. Oily roadspray, doncha know.
Around every curve I fully expected to see a road sign denoting a (very) short distance remaining to Golden. And every ensuing curve proved to be ever-increasingly, maddenly disappointing.
The last straws were a combination of curvy stretch of dark, 2-lane through a poorly marked construction zone, a line of traffic behind me, a very long line of glaring headlights through my streaked windshield approaching me, and a narrowly missed concrete median dividing construction zone traffic. I wasn’t going very fast, not nearly fast enough for all the traffic on my bumper apparently, but I really don’t know how I avoided side-swiping that concrete barrier.
This occurred a few minutes before seeing the fork in the highway for the Field Tourist Information Centre, as if heaven-sent. A quick left, followed by a right, and we were safely in the parking lot. Unfortunately it was around 10 p.m. and the place was locked up tight; except for the public washrooms. Again, at that point, heaven-sent.
The washrooms were the one glowing beacon in this whole debacle. They were brand-new, and apparently open to the public on a 24-hour basis. I did note, however, that at the late hour we had arrived that perhaps it hadn’t been such a great idea for someone (not meaning me) to leave the doors chocked open with garbage bins inside. Upon our exit from the facilities, I ensured the doors were closed, but unlocked. The last thing you want to meet is Mama Bear and her cubs rooting through the garbage in the washroom lobby as you stumble in rubbing sleep from your eyes.
We did attempt once more to make our reservation in Golden after the rain let up a bit. We got perhaps 2 km down the highway before I turned back. It was like thinking you could most certainly swim across that small channel, and then chickening out a very short distance from shore. Once we’d mentally kissed our comfy Golden hotel room good-bye, we aimed the car across the narrow bridge over the river to see if Field held any available lodging. Slow trolling of the few streets of Field revealed one full travel lodge and several Not Vacant B&Bs.
Back to the Tourist Info Centre. Did I mention it was an 11oC summer evening? By this time, at around 11 p.m., we were resigned to catching as many zzz’s as could be caught by bunking in the car overnight. And I must say, it wasn’t anywhere as near satisfying as that cartoon freeway reststop appeared to be. It had completely lost any pretense of attraction that it may ever had held for me.
Fortunately our dog was safe at home staying with my Mom, or else rearranging luggage within the car in order to recline the seats would have been near impossible with her kennel stowed near the hatchback. As it was I moved almost everything into the hatch area, save for a few smaller bags we stashed between us.
We drifted off somewhere close to 2:00 a.m., serenaded by the sounds of all-night-long semi-trailer truck traffic, and were awakened at 6:00 by the slamming car doors of a Filipino family having just driven eastward through the night from Vancouver.
I think I can honestly say we’ve gotten the halfway-across-Canada driving trip out of our systems for the foreseeable future.
