On the Road Again 2012 #12

I went looking for the cheapest looking motel and I found it. It was of an old "pan-a-bode" ( pre-fab log building) design that had clearly had seen better days. It was dwarfed by the more modern looking and larger motels around it. But the name got my attention..... "Sweet Dreams Motel". Who could resist staying in a place that had such a charming name?

It was almost 9:30 and in spite of the fact that the sign said that the office was open until 11:00 there was no immediate response to the door bell. In fact I was about to turn away when I saw, through the office door window an older women wrapped in a bathrobe approaching the door. For a moment I thought that perhaps the building had been turned into a residence and I had awoken a permanent resident. I apologize for disturbing her but her response was somewhat reassuring " Its O.K., that is what I am here for.

There were still some rooms available for $66.00 (tax included) a night. I was delighted by the price. She was not very empathetic about my slow rate of travel. When I mentioned that I was hitchhiking to Yellowknife she suggested that I was either travelling in the wrong direction or at the wrong time as many northerners were be heading towards urban areas (south) for the long weekend. But she had a friendly smile and it was fun to trade quips with here. I don't think she knew how to give a straight answer. When she gave me my room key, I asked her where it was. She just said "go out the door and follow the number until you find it"! She was fun. When I had mentioned that I had decided to stay for the night in part because of the storm that was approaching - she said " it has been threatening to rain for days, it won't rain tonight" She was right.

The building looked run down. What ever colour the milled, fabricated logs had been - they were now a dirty brown. There was at least one vehicle that I saw  that looked abandoned. Its back end was jacked up and the tires and rims were off. It had last year's plates on it. Inside it was equally as interesting. Rather dark and while everything was clean, it all certainly looked like it had been used before.But the bathroom was fine (if noisy as the family next door could be heard quite clearly), either of the two beds were comfortable and the curtains were double lined so that very light could get through them.

 I put on my sandals and went to find a restaurant. There was attached to the hotel next door and as it looked almost empty I was worried that I would missed another meal. But the young waitress was friendly and welcoming. The menu was less so. The only thing on it that I could eat was a stir fry with no meat. That may sound awkward or poorly phrased but I had order a stir fry with no meat. It was surprisingly good.

I went for a brief walk after supper and then went to bed. Tired for no particular reason, but tired none-the-less

On the Road Again 2012 #11

According to Wikipedia High Level is about 450 kilometers north of Edmonton and 725 km south of Yellowknife. I certainly had not travelled very far in the two days since leaving Susan outside of Edmonton. High Level appeared to have a high percentage of First Nations residents or at least it felt as if First Nations individuals were driving the majority of cars and trucks that passed me. The other thing that I noticed was that in High Level there seemed to be an inordinate number of motels/hotels. If my memory is right, there were at least ten of them. Some of them were fairly big and belonged to national chains. Others were quite clearly local only operations. I wasn't planning on staying in this town but it was good to know that there were options. So many motels suggested that there was some sort of oil exploration going on or that this was one hell of a tourist hot spot.

The spot I chose to stand at the edge of High Level looked to be a lovely spot. Nice wide shoulder, cars still going slow, and great sight lines. Folks if they wanted to do, could have seen me from almost the other edge of town. High Level did  not appear to be a large town but then one can never tell what houses or streets lie just behind the highway. For all I knew there could have been a medium size city just west of the town. There was certainly a lot of traffic around me. Just to my left there was a large Best Western Hotel that had a swimming pool. The pool was open to the public. There were streams of cars and trucks full of kids driving into the parking lot for a swim while young teenagers casually strolled across the highway heading towards the pool. All but the youngest children ignored me, most almost making a point of looking the other way.  The young ones just pointed at me and asked their mothers questions. I don't know what they were told but I am quite sure that at least some of the adults had not seen a hitchhiker very often.

It was now close to 9:00 pm and the sun was still visible. However it was so low in the sky that my broad brimmed hat no longer provided much protection. Consequently my nose got rather badly burnt and so did the side of my neck just under my ears. While it was not the first time that my nose got burnt I can't remember ever having a sunburn on that part of my neck.

After being at that spot for some time I noticed a reasonably large dirt bike roaring out of an ally on the other side of the road, then tearing across the highway 20 feet north of me and finally disappearing into the woods. Seconds later a four wheel drive police truck tore out of the same alley and chased after the motorcyclist. I was never sure if the police caught the guy or not but twenty minutes a tow truck came and carted of the guy's bike. While the whole incident was somewhat interesting to watch it did cause me some concern as I thought about having to sleep out that night. Right where the motorbike turned into the woods was where I sort of had thought about sleeping for the night. The other thing that I noticed was a conservation authority truck driving around with looked like a bison (buffalo) head in it. I would have liked to have had a closer look at it and even more I would have loved to talk to the female conservation officer as to why the head was in the back of her truck.

Off the the south west the sky was black with clouds. I could see where, in the distance, there was a torrential downpour . Then the thunder and lightening started. Again it was fairly far away, but the wind was blowing the clouds towards me. I decided to call it a night and to look for a cheap motel. In spite of only travelling about 200-250 kilometers that day but it looked like I was done for the day. The oncoming rain, the bears and a potential police investigation were all factors in me deciding to find a bed for the night. I also had not eaten a real meal since the grilled cheese and fries in North Battleford two days before and thought perhaps I should.

On the Road Again 2012 # 10

There were times this trip I thought about calling the trip "death by a 1,000 rides" (as opposed to On the Road Again"). I really do love meeting people but there are times, especially after a number of short rides that leave me in the middle of nowhere that all I want is one decent long ride.

As I stood on this lonely stretch of highway some north on Manning, I started to count the number of cars that would pass me in a specific length of time. As a car passed me that could have offered me a drive ( I didn't count corporate or transport trucks) I would transfer a pebble from one pocket to another. After all the stones were transferred I, based on the number of cars that passed me in ten minutes, calculated the number of cars an hour that were passing me. There were times that it appeared that only 15-20 cars an hour were going by. Some of the occupants of these cars waved, others vehicles moved to the other side of the road (out of politeness or fear I am not sure), and some occasionally slowed down so they could get a better look, not to offer me a ride but rather as if I was some curiosity to marvel over. Once a pickup going the other direction stopped, a young man rolled down the window and just stared at me for 30 seconds. I guess they don't see many hitchhikers in this part of Alberta.  By my guess, after exhaustive investigation, it appeared that I need a traffic volume of approximately 50 cars an hour to get a ride fairly quickly. That was not going to happen on this road.

However eventually a large pick-up truck did stop. I threw my pack in the back seat - I didn't care where he was going. As I got in, the driver who looked to be around my age, asked if I had a gun or a knife. As I was already in the seat, it seemed like a slightly irrelevant question. But I answered it anyways.

Jake was just off to High Level. I of course was not too sure how far away it was but I had to assume that any town would give me access to more vehicles than where I had been for the past few hours. It turned out to be about 150 kilometers. Not the great long drive that I had been hoping for but it was the longest drive of the day. If the drivers (however few they might have been) were not so nice I would have gotten really discouraged. But they were nice. They all had lots to talk about and while the rides were short - that was not their fault - they generously drove me as far as they were going.

Jake amongst other things was a hunter. He said he only hunted for food for his family. I think he liked and appreciated animals. For example we saw a few black bears along the side of the road and he stopped so that he (and I) could enjoy the sight of a two year old bear eating and playing in the grass. We also talked about rules and why some people follow them. The example he used was hunting from his truck. (apparently you can be standing beside your car and shoot or you can, from a stand up a tree, shoot at a bear that has been trained to eat garbage out of a steel drum, but you can't shoot an animal from a truck?). His point was, if you do it and no one sees you do it, what moral law has been broken? Who has been hurt? Clearly, except for the animal no one has and the animal would have been shot anyway. I suspect he had done it more than once. Hunting was not a sport to him - it was shopping for the winter's meat.

We also talked about kids and their expectations. His young adult daughter wanted him to co-sign a car loan. He was prepared to do that but he thought she should probably not buy a brand new car and that she should get a job first. It was hard to argue with him.

Jake let me out at the southern end of High Level at a place that he said trucks stopped. It was a small gas station and I decided to walk to other end of town (which was only a ten minute walk). It was only around 6:00 so I knew I had lots of time left to get a ride further north. I knew the sun was not going to set anytime soon.

On the Road Again 2012 intermission

As you may have noted I have not be blogging for the last few days. I was on Salt Spring Island.

Tomorrow I am off to the folk festival at Providence Farm.

So it might be Monday before I get back to it. If on the other hand the ordering of my new tablet had not got messed up, I might be up to date.

On the Road Again 2012 #9

I , when I had gone to bed the previous night, had had a brief twinge of guilt over not hitchhiking a bit longer. After all the reason why I normally do not hitch past 8:30- 9:00 is that is is getting both too dark for me to see the cars or for the cars to see me. But last night when I finally went to sleep after 11:00 it was still bright outside. I could have been on the road for another three-four hours. Of course me standing there at 10:00 PM in no way guarantees that anyone would be driving anywhere I wanted to go. It was after all, the beginning of a long weekend.

To make up for my apparent slackness the previous night I was up and ready to go before 7:00. I handed in my motel room card and was on the road by 7:15.  All of my rushing about was somewhat wasted. I could in fact have stayed in bed for another hour and probably had some breakfast. In the first half hour of being on the road I saw only a handful of cars  and most of those cars were heading into town. Eventually I did get a brief twenty minute ride in a rather nice full size car which took me up to the intersection of  highways 2 and 35. My driver, an older gentleman who by profession was a truck driver for an oil exploration company promised me that there would be more traffic there. He was right. There was a bit more traffic but there were still five-ten minute spells when there were no cars at all. It took a while for one of those cars to stop.

My next ride was once again in one of those big pick-ups that seem so popular in Alberta. Although in this case at least the box was being well used. My new driver was a young thirty something man who ran his own small trucking company and was taking a few hours on a Saturday morning to deliver some tires to a garage in Manning. My driver had grown up in the Yukon where his parents and grandparents were determined to be self-sufficient. From my driver's perspective this meant that while he had to do without a lot of things he also developed some great skills in terms of repairing and building machinery (e.g. his first motorbike) and the value of hard work. And work hard he did. He had driven trucks for other companies but had decided to start his own trucking company in direct competition to the "big companies". He knew that he could be more flexible and customer orientated than the other companies and therefore he would do well. He also knew that within a year or so one of the big companies would offer to buy him out. At that point he would have enough money to start another company.

He had one four year old boy and so we discussed being a dad. We quickly got onto the issue of rules and discipline. For the most part he was a far stricter dad than I had ever been. His son already had small chores to do and got an allowance for it. On the other hand his four year old  had a small off-wheel quad. Dad was quite clear that while he would be a strict dad, his children would never have to do without like he had had.

We also indirectly discussed fuel mileage. He was quite please with the mileage he was getting in his truck.He seemed quite content that he was averaging  17 liters per 100 kilometers. I didn't have the heart that on a good day my magic number is about 5..5.

I only saw Manning from the highway so I do not have a clue how big it is or what it is like. I do not that there is a lot of local traffic and that there seemed to be an inordinate number of people visiting the local tire place. None of them offered me a ride. It was at Manning that I started to notices that there was some usual pebbles mixed into the gravel and picked up a few to play with. By the time I got to Yellowknife I had collected eight such stones. Sometimes I would find one I liked, keep it for awhile and then discard it when I found one I liked better. I don't know why eight became the magic number but it did.

One can perhaps tell that I was at this spot for sometime and that the scenery was not particularly interesting. Looking for stones kept me awake and moving.

After what felt like a long wait two young men who were plumbers offered me a twenty minute ride down the road. In the belief that turning down a ride going in the right direction angers the gods of hitchhiking, I took the ride and ended up on a stretch of highway that did not look promising. There were farmers fields around me and not much else. I did however find a few more interesting stones.

On the Road Again 2012 #8

One of my little pleasures of travelling is, after a long day, to find a restaurant where the locals hang out so that along with my beer and a meal I can observe the interactions. Sometimes I am lucky enough to find a greasy spoon and have the chance to have a few words with the waitress, other times it is a Boston Pizza or a Casey's that I sit in. Either way it provides a brief window into that community. I usually am able after my meal to go for a walk around the town and see what kind of stores line the main streets, to see who if anyone who is hanging around the corners. I have walked down the streets of towns from Massey, Ontario to Tofino on Vancouver Island; I have paused at those corners and occasionally walked down darkened alleys in Sault St. Marie, Calgary,Winnipeg or Vancouver; and I have walked along quiet residential streets in towns as far apart as Thunder Bay and Nanaimo all because I am curious about the people who live in those places. My note books and my memory banks are full of those observations. I will never use them but it gives me pleasure to collect them. I did not do any of those things in Peace River, Alberta.

The motel was nice. The room was perhaps the largest I have ever been in. The king size bed was far more than I needed for a single nights sleep alone. I think a family of four or five could have fitted quite nicely on to the bed. It felt overly large and almost uncomfortable. When I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and realized that I my very expensive mouth guard (that the dentist says that I need to wear to save my even more expensive gold crowns from shattering) had fallen out and was lost somewhere in the bed, the bed took on enormous dimensions.

The room itself was also over sized with an electric fireplace in one corner and enough room left over to teach someone ballroom dancing. The television was so far away from the bed that I had to turn up the volume to hear the weather forecast for the next day.

Between the size of the bed and the room in general, one has to wonder who would expect that much space. Surely not the guys on the rigs. Motel accommodation is apparently in short supply and I was told that the big exploration companies front the money to the motel chains so that they can build more, and bigger motels for the workers.

There was no restaurant that I could find that was open except the Chinese restaurant attached to the motel. There were no none meat dishes on the menu except for rice so I thanked them kindly and left. I walked across the highway to a grocery that was open 24 hours and bought a egg salad sandwich and bag of chips and an apple juice. Not quite the meal I was planning on. There may have been, in fact I am quite sure that there were other restaurants in town, I just could not figure out how to find the centre of the down.

Except for the search for mouth guard and the fact that it was a lot brighter at 12:00 than I am use to - I slept well.

p.s. it may have been the best bought egg salad sandwich I have ever had and I don't think it is because I was really hungry not having eaten all day.

On the road Again 2012 #7

Valleyview, Alberta - or at least the little part I saw of it looked like a crossroads to other places. The description of the town from their own website confirms that perspective:

 "At the Crossroads to Opportunity - 350 kms north of Edmonton and 115 kms east of the City of   Grande Prairie.  The Town of Valleyview is strategically located at important crossroads that lead to Canada's north. Excellent paved Highways lead the traveller to northern adventure via Highway 49 leading to Peace River and the Mackenzie Highway that will take you to the Northwest Territories, and Highway 43 leading to Dawson Creek, the Alaska Highway and adventure in northeastern British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska.  Population: Town of Valleyview 1,884 and the trading area 5,000." (source http://valleyview.govoffice.com/)

There were a number of motels that I could see from my vantage point, there were a lot of both pick-up trucks and larger tanker trucks passing me by and I could see family vehicles hauling fairly large trailers stopping to take their dog for a walk and then moving on. Many of the larger trucks left a raw oily smell in the air as they roared past. The smell slightly turned my stomach.  While it was nothing specific or unusual I had a sense of discomfort, or not belonging to this culture of oil exploration. Perhaps I was just tired or being over sensitive but something felt a bit unwelcoming.Or perhaps the feeling was generated by a few rude comments directed at me, made by folks as they drove by. As I have said before - I wish I could tell people that while I can get the tone of their slurs, it is really hard to hear what someones shouts out of the vehicle as they zoom by at 80 or a 100 kilometers an hour.

I was there at that corner of highways for quite a while and as it was starting to get late (by my watch, not the height of the sun in the sky) I, in spite of it being a poor travelling day, was getting ready to walk over to the nearest motel. Just after I made a call to my daughter to say that I was still alive etc, a large pick-up truck with a back seat that seemed larger than the combined square footage of the front and back seat of my car stopped. There was a couple in the front seat. The male driver asked me if I was going to Edmonton. Which may seem like a strange question considering that I had spent most of the day, albeit somewhat unsuccessfully, trying to get away from that city. I suspect that my sign which on one side said "Yellowknife" and on the other side said "Edmonton" had been accidentally flipped over and was showing the wrong city. The good folks were just stopping to tell me I was going in the wrong direction.. But when they heard where I was going they didn't have the heart to refuse a ride so I got in. Perhaps I should use that tactic more often!

It was only a hour and a half drive to the town of Peace River which is surprisingly little time to talk and to get to know someone. They were off for a weekend in the Peace River country. He was an oil rig worker ( I can never get straight what all of the jobs are around a rig - so I am never sure what the guys actually do) somewhere near Edmonton but they both loved the northern Alberta country and would move there if it was not so far away from their families. They had two young children at home and I think the woman was a stay-at-home mom. He had done some hitchhiking when he was around 16 or so throughout parts of BC but I am fairly sure that I was his wife's first experience with hitchhiking.

We mostly talked about the oil exploration that was happening in the area. He talked about the "oil sands" that had been discovered near Peace River and the fact that because there was no pipe line to transport the raw crude, it was being shipped in tanker trucks. He thought for every $10,000 dollars in crude heading south, it was costing $3,000 in shipping. Not, in my mind or his, a good use of resources.

We went around a long curve and there, in a valley, was an absolutely perfect setting for a town.

 While the picture does not show it - the sun on the Peace River was quite glorious. Unfortunately the closer we got, the less attractive the town became.  Peace River appeared to be turning into an industrial area. I understand the importance of jobs and the need for folks to feed their families and pay for their mortgages - but destroying the character and the beauty of an area seems to be a very high price indeed.

After some discussion and considering it was around 9:00 pm, they dropped me off at a motel on the northern edges of the town.

Peace River is a scenic, vibrant, urban centre in Alberta's northwest and is home to over 6,000 residents. The community is situated in the Peace River Valley and straddles the banks of the mighty Peace River. The town is within a five hours’ drive north of Edmonton and two hours northeast of Grande Prairie and is serviced with air, rail and bus links. 

 Peace River provides a wide range of services to the surrounding areas. Among these are an impressive combination of businesses including locally owned downtown stores and restaurants, as well as national and international retailers.In October, Peace River was awarded the 'Cultureville 2011' title in the prestigious competition that celebrates CBC's 75th Anniversary and Alberta Art Days. When accepting the award, Mayor Lorne Mann said it was an endorsement of Peace River's thriving community. (source http://www.peaceriver.ca/)


p.s. the couple had a wee dog in the back seat that mostly ignored me and a large dog in the back of the truck. I thought of Susan as I watched through the back window as the dog struggled to keep its balance as we went around curves etc. She would not have been happy.