My twice-a-year cross-Canada road trip | Canada Voices

I have just crossed the border from B.C. into Alberta – Day 1 of five days driving to Toronto. I look out onto an ominous sky above a meadow. I shake my head. A tornado? Can’t be. A funnel cloud stretches toward the earth like a breathing organism. What should I do? The only thing I can do. I reach across to the passenger seat to pet Farley, my border collie husky and co-pilot, whose sweet brown eyes assure me: “It’s okay, Mom.” I take a deep breath and continue driving.

It’s my eighth trip with Farley since we moved out west in 2021: 4,000 kilometres, more than 40 hours, through five provinces and three time zones. And while I have carved out my favourite stops hopping from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., to Thunder Bay, Winnipeg to Moose Jaw, no two trips are ever the same.

In the winter of 2021, my partner and I packed up our small car with Tom, our cat, and our dog, dragging a loaded U-Haul from Queen Street West in downtown Toronto to the remote Kootenay mountains, where bears play with your garbage instead of raccoons. I vowed to my friends that I would return often. I’ve kept that promise. But this road trip isn’t a vacation.

It’s long, slow solitude in a driver’s seat, eating tuna wraps days on end to make good time and cut costs. It’s also scary at times, like when your car makes a strange noise you have no idea how to fix. Or being watched by a group of guys as you walk to your motel room. But it’s also joyous. Skinny dipping in Lake Superior at a secluded rest stop, in water so clear you can see the bottom.

From Toronto, it takes two days to leave Ontario, but the long stretches of lonely highway along Lake Superior are spiritual – cresting unveils vistas of expansive blue water so big, you’d swear it was the ocean.

Driving by obscure town names like Upsala, Ignace. Long, very long stretches with no services and no people. Dozens of ghost towns, often marked with a desiccated gas station or an abandoned graffitied motel. I stop and investigate. Peering through the broken glass of a bedroom, a strewn mattress, clothes, beer bottles. What happened here? Was it a party or a disgruntled alien? Where did everyone go?

From the first trip, I knew I’d go stir crazy if I didn’t exercise, so I reached out to local bike shops to meet up with other cyclists. We’d bomb through the forest for a few hours, bonding over our love of bikes. It’s unbelievably heart-warming when mountain bikers show up. I’ve ridden over whale-back-size slabs of Canadian Shield rock in the Hiawatha Highlands in Sault Ste. Marie; camped at Trowbridge Falls Park in Thunder Bay only to wake at dawn and slip into the nearby bike park.

But hands down, the strangest trails are in Winnipeg. When Winnipeg needed mountain-bike trails for the 2017 Canadian Summer Games, they built a mountain out of concrete leftovers from big-box stores. Today the grass and moss have grown over the trails of Bison Butte on the central plain of FortWhyte. You’d never know it was once construction garbage.

These bike rides keep me limber for hours of sitting in the car. And to keep my brain stimulated, podcasts have become my saviour. They include a gruesome, yet titillating, true-crime podcast called Morbid, or, if I need a chuckle, Savage Love dips into the wacky sexual lives of everyday people.

One year, I removed the back seats from my Nissan Rogue SUV, laid out an air mattress and parked at campsites all along the route. I never slept well, but I bonded with Farley. One time we ran on trails cutting through the valley, a coulée, in Lethbridge, Alta. We sprinted up and stumbled down the steep canyon walls beside Indian Battle Park, where Blackfoot and Cree Nations fought in 1870, before reaching a peace treaty a year later.

As the dawn broke over the enormous trestle bridge and the forbidding coal mine in the distance, we stopped and watched the new sun make shadows on the golden grass. I loved sharing these moments with my doggie, but sometimes, I would give almost anything for company.

For one drive in 2022, I knew I was pushing my luck leaving Toronto in mid-October. By the time I got to Saskatchewan, I hit a snowstorm so vicious I couldn’t see through the whiteout. Touching the brakes, black ice tugged the car in all directions. Then, traffic stopped. Light turned to darkness as Farley and I were stranded. With no cell service, I knocked on the car beside me to ask if he knew anything: “Yeah, there’s a tractor down ahead, it might be a while.” Four hours later, Farley and I pulled into the Motel 6 just past midnight.

But the real fear of driving alone is fatigue. I had been driving for more than 10 hours in Saskatchewan on what I thought was a double-laned highway, both lanes in the same direction. It was mid-afternoon when I pulled up beside an 18-wheeler, who suddenly wouldn’t lay off his horn. Then, I noticed: Car lights coming right at me. I swerved into the correct lane at the last second. Kilometres of straight roads will do that to you.

In Saskatchewan, the joke goes, it’s so flat you can see your dog run away for three days. I’ve seen otherwise. Just 20 kilometres northeast of Moose Jaw, like a mirage, the golden Qu’Appelle Valley appears. Here, on the site of a former ski hill, there are some 30 kilometres of swoopy bike trails and a campsite. I like to stop here and, one early morning, before the sun is up, Farley and I head out for a ride: Pedalling through the forest that opens up into a glacial valley, Farley joyously chases the unsuspecting horses from a nearby ranch.

If I have time, I’ll stay with another cycling friend in Moose Jaw. From Jen’s house, we descent into Wakamow Valley, the site of a former zoo. The giant stone pillars overgrown with vines remind me of a defunct Jurassic Park. You can almost feel the ghosts of the lions near the river.

And cooler still, Jen introduced me to Moose Jaw. With its saloon-style facades, it smacks of the Wild West. We toured a 1958 Cold War bunker that spans 12,000 square feet! We take an elevator down to Bunker 24. Sandwiched between the damp rock walls, it’s chilly in this surreal sci-fi graveyard complete with a teal-coloured kitchen, including a Formica table, Life magazines and a paper calendar from 1958.

You could spend a lifetime exploring the obscure places across Canada, but some trips, I barely stop at all except for gas. But sometimes, when my butt has lost all feeling, when the podcasts all sound the same and when Farley needs to pee, I just stop, wherever I am.

One such spontaneous stop was Rainbow Falls Provincial Park along Lake Superior. Farley ran ahead of me on the stairs alongside the falls. It wasn’t like any waterfall I’d seen – the ledges resembled one of those pyramids of champagne glasses where the bubbly overflows into each glass. I ran back to the car and grabbed the peach-jam jar from the glove box where I’d been keeping my mom’s ashes for the past year. I hadn’t known what to do with them.

Down by the pool, I sprinkled some of her into the frothy, swirling water. Just a dash or two. There’s bound to be more places she might love, on another one of my inevitable road trips.

Back in the car, I plugged in the GPS co-ordinates for the next motel, held Farley and cried.