On the Road Again (2015) Spring Fever and Travel Lust

We are now starting the second week of April. Usually by now I am dreaming almost every night about being on the road, of thinking of the spots I will stand in, of what city buses I will need to get on to get out of Winnipeg or Calgary or Vancouver and where I might sleep the nights I am on the road. By the beginning of April I normally have started to get my traveling gear together - thinking about what new piece of equipment I need to buy, how little I will need to take and what I will send ahead by mail. This year - nothing. Oh - there has been the odd dream and quick flash of memory of a certain spot and the very occasional thought or question of how fast I will get there or if this is the year I make it to the Yukon - but no spring fever; no sense of being incapacitated by an almost overpowering travel lust that can consume every thought, every micron of energy. That flash that in other years has almost paralyzed me into inaction as I have been consumed about the possibility of being on the road again. I don't think we have had the at least three days in a row of nice warm, sunny weather that my body requires to wake up to the fact that it is traveling time again. Until last Friday.

I was traveling up to Sudbury to spend a few days with my daughter and grandchildren. It was a grand sunny day at least from inside the car. While there was still the odd bit of snow on the ground, I was driving with my sandals on in the hopes that I could trick my body (and perhaps convinced the gods) that spring, if it had not actually arrived, was at least well on its way. I, foolishly as it turned out, made the assumption that it would not only be as nice in Sudbury as it had been in Peterborough but that the temperatures would continue to rise throughout the weekend. As I was driving along, listening to a recorded book written by one of my favourite authors (James Lee Burke) I passed a big rig parked in one  of the lay-bys that are scattered along the more northern parts of the 400. It looked old and more than a little bit dirty. One had the sense that the driver had just crawled into his bunk, tired from the countless thousands of miles he and the truck had travelled together. Without wanting too anthropomorphic, the truck looked abandoned and forlorn. And in the half second it took to pass the truck I was, at least for a moment transformed. It took all of my willpower to not stop the car, back it up to the entrance to the lay-by, park my car behind the truck and bang on the trucker's door. All that I wanted was to get into that truck and just go. It was such an overwhelming urge that I had to turn of the CD player and slow down.

The brain has the capacity to have thousands of thoughts - all of which are contained between two blinks of an eye. Thousands of thoughts that can just flash along the surface of the mind and yet somehow create a succinct narrative,. I saw as clearly as anything I have ever seen what I would say to the trucker, what I would say to my daughter as I called her from the road somewhere north of Sudbury and the hundreds of other things I need to do before I can travel. I felt the impossible-to-describe joy, exhilaration, excitement and sheer thrill of being on the road again.

Of course that feeling didn't last long. Being the practical methodical planner I am ( some would say I am a bit of a plodder), it quickly became apparent that travelling immediately probably was not the best plan. I had just too many commitments including the need to sell my weaving at the Saturday Market, attending both my final convocation at Fleming College and my granddaughter's graduation from grade eight and not the least, shutting of all of my electrical devices in my apartment to save money while I am away. By the time I could no longer see the truck in my review mirror I was back on track. My heart had resumed its normal if laboured rhythm, the usual portion of my brain was paying attention to the road and I was once again somewhat rational.

I didn't however, turn the CD player back on for awhile. I wanted to bask just for awhile in the memory of what almost was and to dream of what was to come.