On The Road Again
Just the idea of a road trip often stirs up feelings of nostalgia, frustration, dread, excitement, humour and adventure. The descriptions of your memories seem to change to match the era in which you grew up. I have memories of sweaty seat vinyl on bare-skinned legs. Memories of highly enforced territories in the back seat of the car between my siblings, and hand-cranked windows to adjust the temperature of the car. I recall my parents asking for lead, or was it unleaded gasoline? Seat belts were optional and the memories of being forced to drink liquid Gravol still make me cringe!
As I prepared for our annual family road trip this summer, I realized that family road trips are very different nowadays. Now they entail pre-planning by loading iPods with new music, podcasts and the current popular apps. Modern-day car travel consists of movies, audiobooks, seat belts and reclined seating with individual climate controls. Thankfully for my daughter, the Gravol is now brilliantly encased in a fine coating so you don’t have to suffer the bitter taste.
But what remains the same is the long hours spent in a close space present in each other’s company. Hours and hours spent together experiencing the smells and sounds of your family moving along a stretch of highway. Moving together towards a common destination.
The destination of the road trip is often the goal or the place in which we look forward to reaching the most. But what I love so much about our annual road trip through Northern Ontario, is that each one of us gets excited by points of our journey along the way.
Passing Barrie, Ontario is often a relief because the north begins to open up slowly. Clear lakes begin to appear and the traffic eases. French River is where we see the beautiful footbridge and is a good pit stop for the dog. Then onwards to Sudbury and the rock appears. Once we pass Sudbury, we can feel Sault Sainte Marie calling. The Sault is the end of one long day of driving. We get out of the cramped car, stretch, walk the dog and check in to the same hotel that we have stayed in for years and years. It is a summer homecoming and it seems to never change.
The next morning the road trip becomes even more exciting. We enter Northern Ontario through a light morning mist and feel the call of the woods and the wild. Our eyes are alert looking for moose, bear and deer. We pass Batchawana Bay, Lake Superior Provincial Park, Wawa and then White River. (White River is where I spent a summer planting trees and I often look into the woods wondering how tall those trees would be today). The TransCanada Highway leads us by Marathon, Nippigon, Schrieber and then Terry Fox greets us at Thunder Bay. We are almost there!
We finally head south at Thunder Bay and cross the border at Pigeon River and can hardly contain our excitement as we head towards Grand Marais, Minnesota! Two days of driving and we arrive at this familiar and loved artistic community on the shore of Lake Superior. We smell the clean Superior air, collect our provisions jump back into the car and head for the woods.
We are all children on this ride. We all share the same excitement, nostalgia and love for the places in which we drive through. We share a collected love for the arrival of the dirt road, the north woods, the cabins steeped with family history and lore; and after two days we can finally laugh at the sounds, the smells and the chatter of our family squeezed into a packed car. We are blessed and we know it.
