On the Road Blog #14

The Sky-Train and bus connections to the ferry terminal at Horseshoe Bay were easy to manage and I only need to ask for directions once. I was pretty please with myself when I got to the terminal to find out that the next ferry would be leaving in about 30 minutes. At this rate I was going to be in Duncan well before noon. Silly me. I should have known that things could not continue to go as smoothly as they had in the past few days.

I do not know Nanaimo well. In fact I barely know it all. Last year I had spent an evening there waiting for an early morning ferry to Horseshoe Bay heading home via Whistler. As I usually do when I am in new city, I had spent a few hours walking around the town. I thought that I had gotten a sense of how the city was laid out. I was wrong.

After getting off the ferry I could have, I should have, taken the city bus that was waiting outside the ferry terminal. It would have probably got me to the Greyhound bus station in good time. I could have then had a nice quiet inner-city bus ride to Duncan and then with a ten minute walk, been at my son's home in short order with no fuss or a large expenditure of energy. But I did not do that, instead I decided without much thought and with the sure assumption that as my hitching had been so good, it would continue to be good, to hitch to Duncan.

As I have said, it was not a well thought out plan. I ended up walking for a long way through the city and I was never too sure where I was. There were a couple of streets that looked as if they could head towards the highway but they were all steeply uphill so I kept on walking. At one point an older man in a power wheelchair started to follow me, yelling abuses at me, accusing me of not working and being a bum. His comments were quite harsh and somewhat bothersome. I didn't bother to stop and talk to him. While I was curious as to know what had got him going, I was not curious enough to be exposed to any more of his foul abusive language. It all seemed so irrational that I did not think that a dialogue would do much good. It is the first time in all of my travels that I have been confronted this way. Occasionally drivers somewhere along the Trans-Canada will yell something out, but never have I been exposed to something so personally directed.It was unnerving and unsettling.

Eventually I got to the outskirts of the city and there was a spot that looked like great spot to stand both in terms of how wide the shoulder was and visibility. Unfortunately there was a person standing there already. So I had to walk bit further down the road to another spot that was not quite as good. There were lots of cars but none of them stopped. I was there for about 45 minutes before the other hitchhiker got a ride. I walked back down the road to his spot and stuck out my thumb. It was another 20 or so minutes before a car stopped for me.

My new driver said that he was in a rush as he had to make the ferry to Vancouver. Because I had just left one ferry terminal, I made the assumption that he was going to the terminal in Victoria. How many ferry terminals could there be? It turns out that there are more than I thought. He drove me down the road, onto the highway (who knew that the pleasant little country road turned into a major four lane divided highway?) And then six or seven minutes later, he turned off heading towards the other terminal. I got out, a bit confused, thanked him, and he took off. I was now standing at the worst imaginable spot to hitch. The traffic was zipping by at a 100+ kilometers an hour, there were merging lines of traffic and I knew that there was no hitchhiking allowed along this section. (actually hitchhiking is not illegal, stopping to pick up someone is) But I had no choice. So I stuck out my thumb.

Twenty or so minutes later I did get a ride. Just a short one but at least it was to a slightly safer spot. At some point during my wait, my cell phone rang. I never leave my cell phone on so I was more than bit surprised. It took me a few minutes to recognize what the noise was and then find it. It was my daughter-in-law wondering where I was. I had called from the ferry to tell her that I was going to be there soon. She assumed that I should have been in by now. She was right, I should have been. However I did not accept her offer to come and get me. Silly pride. It took two more short rides before I got to Duncan. It had taken me longer, in terms of standing on the road to get from Nanaimo to Duncan than it had to go from Winnipeg to Vancouver. So much for the theory that it is easier to get rides on the west coast than any where else in Canada.

But I was where I wanted to be - at home in Duncan. Two and half days to get from Winnipeg was still a good traveling time. It was almost exactly how long it had taken me last year going back to Winnipeg. Things were feeling pretty good.