Thanks Bob for an Inspiration from a good friend & colleague

A while back, that very erudite writer & musician, Bob Chartier wrote about a road trip on the Trans-Canada Highway. It got me thinking about my own trips across the Dominion over the years. And I thought I would share a few insights – in case you haven’t traveled the same road.

My earliest memories are with my father at the wheel, hauling the family on summer vacations. We didn’t have much money as Dad was a Presbyterian minister, often in rural parishes. But he did get one month off each summer, and he did occasionally get to preach summer relief for colleagues. And he was committed to teaching his offspring that there was much more to the world than the town we happened to be living in at the time.

Now I need to confess that my first cross-country jaunts were courtesy of Canadian Pacific and its famed Canadian passenger train. Twice before I started school I got as far as Ottawa (and once, due to an unexpected funeral that Dad had to lead, part of the trip home was via Trans Canada Airlines in a piston-prop North Star the plane that seemed to have its engine on fire). I then repeated this trip as a student minister appointed to Manitoba and then Alberta. [Note: I did not get beyond Ontario to the east until after Grade XII when I was appointed to a congregation as a summer student at St. Luke’s Bathurst, New Brunswick and that summer I made it all the way to the shores of Northumberland Straight in Nova Scotia to help at a church camp for a couple of weeks!] Furthermore, the first couple of family trips across the country utilized mostly U.S.A. highways as the Trans-Canada (TCH) was not finished.

For myself personally though it all started in 1965 when I picked up my brand new ‘65 Ford Fairlane Sport Couple at the Oakville Ford factory and after spending some time with family and school friends, I headed back to Alberta via the Trans Canada Highway, choosing the Lake Superior Route. It was a delightful time, although just outside Regina a truck fired a huge stone from between its dual rear wheels into my windshield. I made the trip in a couple of days (sleeping briefly the first evening at the side of the road, and having a real night’s sleep at ministerial friends from an earlier summer church appointment, the second night).

A weird occurance was that, due to the need of the Chairman of the Board of Managers to get a car out to Chauvin Alberta from GM in Oshawa that shortly after arriving at my summer church appointment, I was back on the train to Oshawa. Picked up a rather nondescript 1965 Chevy Biscayne but it had a hot 327 V8 and a 4-speed manual transmission. With my young cousin (Donald) sitting along side (he was too young to share the driving) we managed to drive with few breaks all the way to Chauvin in thirty-three [33] hours (that timing I have never matched again).

In 1967 EXPO was on in Montréal and the same dealer (now my father-in-law) needed some school buses brought to Alberta from Ontario. So we all (wife & young baby, brother-in-law & father-in-law) bundled into my ‘66 Olds Cutlass and drove to Ontario. After dropping them off at the bus factory, we went on to Smith Falls where my folks looked after the baby while my wife & I spent a full day at EXPO ‘67. Then we returned to the factory, also picking up aforementioned cousin Donald (who now had a driver’s license), and with both the bus and the car returned to Edmonton. These recent trips also made partial use of the Yellowhead version of the TCH.

In subsequent years I did other road trips including to the Twin Cities in Minnesota but most of my travels were by plane until a consulting contract in 1975 enabled me to put my family (along with a sister-in-law to help with the kids) in a SUV (‘73 GMC Jimmy) and drove from Penticton to Ontario (flew to Halifax) and then returned via Minneapolis and then to Winnipeg and on via the TCH to the Okanagan.

In the eighties I occasionally drove from Regina to the coast on the TCH, each time noticing the subtle changes & occasional improvements to the highway; but, always enjoying the moment, especially in the early evenings when coming to a crest of a hill you could see a line of prairie schooners in the distance. Always made me think about an earlier time when wagon trains crossed the land.

Cross-country TCH driving didn’t really return until the new millennium and I drove from Alberta to Ontario. Then in 2007 with a move to PEI, the opportunity came to really drive the route. No need to bore you with the details but let me simply say that I had opportunities to drive all the way from Charlottetown to Edmonton and on a most memorable trip in late November of 2013, all the way to Penticton. And even though I’ve also done quite a bit of long-distance driving on USA highways (Edmonton to Dumas Texas & return and Penticton to Duluth Minnesota & return are two special mega-trips that come to mind) the best feelings as a driver has to be the TCH, especially the Northern Ontario option through Cochrane (birthplace of my late father). And now the amazing engineering feat whereby the TCH from Golden BC for about fifteen kms by cliffs alongside a raging mountain river is now a four-land super road, often built out over the canyon itself!!

Anyway, if you haven’t done a TCH trip – try it. You will never regret it…
It makes Willie Nelson’s song On the road again… so much more meaningful… Maybe I should get Bob to join me for one last campaign and he could sing as my old diesel SUV eats up the kms!!

Reflectively speaking
g.w.