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| 2212 km, 23 hours |
The trip was a whirlwind marathon tour of the highways, rest stops, and motels chosen more by necessity than anything. A sick mom delayed our departure by 2 days which put extra pressure to do the trip in 4 days. First leg was 15 hours of straight driving. I have to admit it bothered me to be using so much fuel to acquire small sailboat. Since there was no other way to end up with this type of boat in a useful time frame I accepted that this was a somewhat wasteful extravagance that I would make the best of by spending the trip with my son. We brought a college selection of coke, chips, granola bars and water which allowed no stopping except for gas and beef jerky with one music stop to replenish our CD stores. Wasn't hard to imagine the life of father and son fugitives as we seemed to be largely playing the part. I have to complement the US on their implementation of rest stops and their tendency for divided highways, both of which have likely prevented countless accidents - seemed almost like dare I say it "socialist" infrastructure. I wish we had those kind of facilities and roadwork here. Highlights of the trip included a late dinner in what appeared to be a small town lesbian bar, amazing lightning and thunderstorms, talking for hours with my son Sean about anything and everything, seeing all the motels along the way that were too scary to get out of the van for, meeting Don the builder, ...
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| Don the builder |
...watching Sean refine his tastes for beef jerky, and spending the afternoon with Dave and Mindy bolduc and their amazing collection of Matt Layden boats including the original Enigma 360, Little Cruiser and Swamp Thing. I could not believe Dave's ability to mod these boats into show pieces without losing their character. Dave packed the 3 hours I was there with as much information as he could to make my finishing the boat successful. I was in a pretty deep stupor from lack of sleep and I am certain I could have been a better pupil. Both of them are super friendly and are largely responsible for bringing Matt's Paradox to an wider audience. I'm very happy to have met them.
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| Dave and Mindy |
The driving schedule had slipped from a 14 hour day to a 10 hour, 9 hour and then 7 and then I hit a wall. The later days were filled with loading the boat and visiting the Bolduc's but I was also in decline. Sean had been able to catch up on sleep while we drove but on the 4th night I could feel my perceptions begin to distort. The nighttime road was level but appeared like we were driving down hill, corners required too much concentration to navigate and it felt like I could only drive another 15 minutes. I got Sean to pick a motel on the gps and the first 2 were in the too scary category. The next one we tried to find was based on a sign at the side of the highway and as it turned out I went right past the driveway and headed down a narrow country road about 5 km. I was slowing down badly and when I finally found a place to turn around I had accumulated probably 80 cars behind me without seeing a single oncoming car. I got back to the hotel with the usual plan to get my son something to eat but instead dropped like stone and slept until morning. He was able to survive on his stash of beef jerky. I don't remember ever collapsing like that. Coincidentally unknown to me my mom had been admitted to hospital and was in a similar state of exhaustion. She was over the wost of it by the next day but we had a perplexing problem. The GPS wanted to take us
through Montreal and increase the trip by 16 hours. Nothing seemed to
cure it until we realized toll avoidance was enabled. Turns out to save about $3 in tolls we could have driven up around lake Ontario. I'm sure we drove a bunch of extra miles because of that setting. In Ontario we have the most expensive toll road in the world so without that setting our GPS would be next to useless around north Toronto but it cost us on this trip. Once that was fixed we had a great trip through the West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York state and we sailed through the border after paying our duties. The entire trip I imagined some minor car accident turning the entire boat into splinters and I was relieved to back my Enigma into my new workshop safe and sound. Phew!
