Just Getting There

• Posted on November 11, 2008 at 10:42 AM
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Part of the adventure of working up north, for me, is the drive. I live in Madoc and work around Wawa. The drive is slightly over or slightly under 1000km depending on the route. The scenery is great, unless you take highway 11 up to Timmins, that's pretty boring. It looks a lot like Southern Ontario, or for the westerners, the drive from Calgary to Edmonton.

I got my job up north through my father, he works there year round. He hates this drive as it takes 12+ hours to make and we've destroyed two cars on the trip up. I actually love the drive even though something bad seems to happen every time I go up.

If you don't like to read about car adventures, I'd stop here.

First Time

On my first trip we were driving in a rental truck. We got going late and were not going to make Missanabie before dark like was planned. We drove up through Parry Sound and Sudbury. I believe the next highway we went on was Hwy 144. We got here at about 8 or 9pm. Still light out, we stopped for supper at the Watershed gas station.

Now for the fun part. The shortcut around here to hwy 101 is the Sultan Rd. It's a fairly well kept logging road. It's all gravel and you can't go too fast on it. We also saw two moose and my dad is super paranoid about hitting moose. We were nearing the 70km marker when my dad said "I think we have a flat."

He opened the window and you could hear the tire making a noise that sounded like "fap fap fap". We weren't going to stop until we got to the turn off at Sultan. It was almost dark by the time we made it to the turn off.

Now to change the tire. We searched the entire truck for the manual. There was no manual. We were both really pissed off. and tried to change the tire without it. We found all the parts to change the tire, had the truck jacked up, but we couldn't get the spare off. The crank did not fit at all. This is when dad went off to find someone to help.

What luck! The one guy he finds is a mechanic, who happens to have a tire that fits the truck. We paid him 40 bucks and he helped us change it. It was 11:30 by the time we finished. We took off after that and ended up getting into Missanabie at 2am.

Total moose count: 5

Edit: A quick note about the Sultan Road. There is a little turn off to Biscotasing, aka Bisco aka Grey Owl's old hangout.

How to Make a 12-hour Trip a 30-hour Trip

Getting back down south without a car is always fun. One option is taking the bus from Wawa to Toronto (and then a bus to avoid the 5 hour layover). The other is the Budd car. I took a break from work in June and decided to take the Budd car. I had heard so many stories about this train: the amazing parties in the baggage compartment, seeing moose swimming in the lakes along the way, having the whole train to yourself, waiting 6 hours along the tracks because the train is late. This is one of those fun Northern Ontario trains that will drop you off or pick you up ANYWHERE.

I got really lucky with the Budd car. It was about 20 minutes late. One of the guys I worked with had to wait about 6 hours for it. That day he waited, another coworker and myself drove from Missanabie to Chapleau, then Wawa, then Hawk Junction and back to Missanabie and managed to see him off.

I was also lucky in that I had an entire car to myself... until a group of school kids got on in Chapleau for a tour. None of them sat with me, so that was nice. They got off a few towns over. I didn't see any swimming moose, though I did see one otter. I thought it was kind of cool seeing tons of trains carrying trailers as cargo in Cartier. I even got to Sudbury before all the sketchy people came out.

Oh, Sudbury. I stayed in Sudbury for a week when I was a kid and loved it. Now that I had to wait 6 hours for a bus I wasn't too keen on it. I walked from the train station to the downtown bus terminal and took a bus to the Greyhound station. I dropped my pack off behind the counter and spent the next six hours calling people on payphones, discovering the city of Sudbury via bus and being apologized to by loud people.

The bus ride from Sudbury to Toronto was rather unpleasant. It was about 6 hours long and jam packed. I'm rather thankful that I can fall asleep really easily when I'm annoyed. Angry naps = best naps. I woke up in Toronto.

The reason why I made my trip so long was that I wanted to buy some gear from MEC. As soon as I got off the bus I hopped the subway to my grandmother's apartment in North York. I made use of her shower and dropped my pack off. I had to take care of some business at a Japanese store and then I came back and got my pack and stashed it down at Union Station.

I did not end up getting boots at MEC ($250 dollars, get outta town) and went back to the train station. I should've taken the Street Car on Spadina but I went for the Subway. Oh great, trains aren't running? I had to book it to Union Station on foot because I had to catch my train very shortly. It gets pretty boring from here on in. I catch train, fall asleep on train, get to Belleville, get ride home, friends present me with best birthday gift ever.

Derailed

The next couple of trips back and forth were pretty uneventful. Then I went up north on my winter reading week to do some office work for the company. My plan was to drive to Sudbury and take the Budd Car to Missanabie. I left Lindsay immediately after school and drove to Sudbury. The roads were great. Sudbury was confusing as usual, and it took me a good hour to find the train station. I just kept following roads until I found train tracks and I just kept following them 'til I hit the train station. So as not to get lost the next morning, I picked the closest hotel to the train station.

The closest hotel was one of those big chains. Thank god the company was paying for the room because it was totally not worth what it cost. Since the TV didn't work I didn't have much else to do so I drove around Sudbury all night. I wasn't going to go for a walk, it was like -30.

The next morning I got ready extra early and had some breakfast (nearly drove into a pothole about a foot deep on the way to Tim Hortons) and got to the train station and downsized my luggage. Then they opened the station and I went in. I went to the counter and the guy working there goes "Budd Car's not running." I thought he was joking; I couldn't tell by the tone of his voice.

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, there was a derailment this morning."

"Um..." I took a good long pause, "Can I use your phone?"

I was actually really excited that the train was cancelled. I've always wanted to drive north along hwy 17, and in the winter at that! I called Missanabie and told them and they were like "Good, you can get us groceries when you get to Wawa." I got a full refund and drove up.

Highway 17 was pretty much car free from the Soo all the way to Wawa. It was also pretty snowy and wet. The other cars must've hated me. I was driving pretty slow, not because of the conditions, but because of the scenery. Damn, you should've seen the ice on Lake Superior! That's one of my favourite drives ever. The only thing that might beat it is crossing the great divide in Yoho and Kootenay.

I got to Wawa at 3 or so and bought groceries for the crew up in Missanabie. I tried to make it to Missanabie before dark, but I got there just after. I knew the 651 would be dicey so I drove as fast as I could on the 101. The 651 was snow/ice packed and the frost heaves were MASSIVE. Like destroy your car if you take them too fast, massive. It took me about an hour and a half to drive a road that normally takes half an hour. I made it to Missanabie just in time to catch supper at Ernie's.

The Last Ride of the Ho-Mobile

We had this station wagon, which my friend Hollie nick named the Ho-Mobile as we would drive it to Timmy Ho's all the time. Haw haw. I think it was a 1995 Ford Taurus (with green interior!) and we had bought in 2007. This was meant to be my dad's car, but I somehow ended up driving it most of the time. I probably made 4 or 5 trips back and forth to Wawa with this car. Then I drove it a lot during the school year. No major mechanical failures either! Ok, I busted the exhaust by backing into a snow bank one day... and the licence plate was bent in half because I drove it through a puddle that was actually a huge pothole in Espanola... and the door handles were starting to break.

The car started making strange noises in the spring. My friends and I went to Toronto and every time we'd stop at a light it would make this loud vibrating noise when I'd start to accelerate. Something was starting to go.

Somehow I got conned into driving some co-workers up north at the beginning of the season. Mark, Leslie, and I piled all of our gear in to the station wagon and got going. This was a bad idea. Overloading the car did not help the problem. The vibrating was happening at just about every stop. I was getting kind of worried. The route I had planned was really remote, although not as hilly as the other options.

We drove up Hwy 62 and then through Algonquin Park. The tourists were extra slow today as they saw a grouse on the side of the road and had to slow to a crawl just to watch it eat some rocks. We had to be somewhere! I went to pass the cars on the first turning lane outside of the park.

Bad idea.

The car started to smoke and started to reek of oil. Luckily there was a little gas station at the bottom of the hill. We made it to the top of the hill and coasted down into the parking lot. The people at the gas station let use the phone to call Canadian Tire and get a tow truck. The man who owned the place grabbed the phone from me halfway through the conversation and started arguing with the guy on the phone about which tow truck company to use.

We had to wait around for a bit and in that time the guy went outside, came back in with a dead grouse (roadkill) and handed it off to his wife in the kitchen. Dinner, anyone?

We were towed to Huntsville and abandoned the car in the Canadian Tire parking lot. It was Victoria Day so we couldn't have it taken in. I just told someone that we had to leave it there and that someone would take care of it eventually. Now we caught a taxi to the bus station in Huntsville and missed the bus to North Bay. We had to wait about 5 hours for another bus. We stashed all of our gear behind the bus counter and explored Huntsville for the rest of the afternoon.

One of the guys from Hawk, Dan, came and picked us up in North Bay. Driving with Dan always means a stop in Sturgeon Falls, even if it's 10pm. He was pretty happy that I was going to drive because he could have a couple of drinks at Gervais. This was the first time I ever visited Sturgeon Falls and didn't heard a word of French. Usually it's the other way around - no English.

We took Hwy 144 and the Sultan Road. There was one moose in a swamp. We ended up getting into Missanabie at 5am and the sun was just rising.

The Ho-Mobile was sent to a scrap yard and we got some money for it. It would've cost more to fix it than we paid for it. My new ride is a bicycle. It has no name yet.

I can't remember the name of this gas station, but it's the first one as you leave the highway heading north to Huntsville on the left side of the highway. You can still see the oil stain where the Ho-mobile once was.

Ow! My eye!

This was such a perfect ride down, we were coming home for the summer. Not terribly eventful, the timing was good. We were going to be back in Madoc for midnight. My sister was sitting in the front seat and I was in the back with the dog. We had just left Algonquin Park.

Then Robe opened the window. Shit! Something flew into my eye and was extremely irritating. I tried washing it out but couldn't get it out. I was sure it was nothing big but my dad insisted on going to the hospital in Bancroft. That was a very irritating hour or so until we got to the hospital.

A few days earlier I had gone to the hospital in Wawa because of another eye injury. I was getting fed up with my safety glasses, they were so scratched up that I could barely see out of them and I got a branch up the eye. I was about a kilometer in the bush at that time and had to suck it up and wait. They couldn't find anything wrong with it in Wawa, but I told them this in Bancroft and they insisted on doing some tests.

I sat around reading ancient issues of Canadian Geographic and some women's magazine for plus size empowerment for a few hours. Nobody was in the waiting room at 1am so I put on some documentary about sexuality in China. I missed the first half of it when I saw at the beginning of August.

When I finally went in to get my eye looked at the doctor froze it, put some dye in it, looked at it, got the piece of dirt out and told me I had perfect vision. I felt pretty dumb for going in for a piece of dirt in the eye but better safe than sorry, right?

We ended up getting home at 3am.