Final Instalment – Day 8: Medicine Hat → Calgary. 300km, 7 hours.

After a surprisingly good sleep in my luxury top-of-the-range ditch, I hit the road again at 6:30am, because my accommodation still did not lend itself to sleep ins. I did not anticipate having too much trouble escaping from Medicine Hat, and after an hour I was in a car with an old engineer named Vic on his way to Redcliff.

After a short time on the road, we reached Redcliff and I hopped out, realising it was the same destination that a gorgeous tattooed blonde had offered me the night before. I had declined her offer, so as to stay in an already-scouted-out area, but I regretted it deeply.

A quick look around confirmed that it would have made a fine place to stay the night, and I continued inwardly cursing myself for letting the opportunity pass by. She would have taken an immediately liking to me, and I to her, then she would have offered me a place to sleep, and then we would have lived happily ever after roaming the world on a romantic whim. Of this, I was certain, and I had only myself to blame.

It took another hour and a half of signholding and smiling to get me another lift, but the lift I got was one of the most memorable I had. A lady truck driver waved me in while she was stopped at the lights, and I wrestled myself and my pack in through the cab door just as the light turned green, taking a seat next to one of the most colourful characters I met on the road.

Chain smoking, cheerful, foul-mouthed and loud, Diane’s manner made it clear that she had maintained a work hard/play hard lifestyle all the way through to the age when most people start their retirement. She was going all the way to Calgary, so I had nearly three hours full of crazy stories, crass jokes, and raucous laughter as we traded tales from the road. She even bought me breakfast at a truckstop, in the form of a pile of pancakes, when she realised I was fairly well impoverished.

Many of the stories she told were on the topic of drugs. As the daughter of a truckstop owner, she had spent her high school years counting out pills to sell to the truckers, who would then drive for days on end kept awake by these illicit chemical packages. Diane herself had relied on the same pills to get her through exams. Continuing this lifestyle of questionable legality, she later found herself working as a drug mule for the Hell’s Angels, running drugs from British Columbia through to Alberta and doing illegal street racing in between times.

These may sound like tall stories, but after hearing them in person, I honestly think they were true. I asked her what the Hell’s Angels were like to deal with, and she replied ‘Well, I wasn’t one of them, but I fit in and they were really good to me. If I ever needed help with anything, they were always happy to send a couple of guys around to lend a hand’. Not for the first time, my normally decent stories paled in comparison. One time I got drunk with a homeless man on a week night, another time I vomited on a first date, but in the presence of gang stories, these stories sounded terribly weak to my own ears. This feeling was reinforced when the told me about getting mugged in California while waiting to pick up a load, then being abandoned by her employers when she drove home empty.

Thankfully, these stories never felt like one-upmanship the way they could have been, and Diane was some of the best company I ever had on the road. She eventually gave up the drug-running street racing days when the other and she turned to the more legitimate career of truck driving. I asked her what she was hauling that day. ‘Air conditioners’, she replied. I could not help but think that air conditioners probably have plenty of spaces to hide secret stashes.

On the road with an ex-drug mule (Calgary)

After a couple of hours of these spectacular stories, Diane reached her truck depot, and my dear friend Kira drove me back to her family’s place, bringing a close to my hitch hiking marathon. Kira and I had many more adventures in the following weeks, and she really was the purpose of my trek out to Calgary, but those are stories for another time.

I spent almost a year in Canada on a 360 Abroad exchange, and without any exaggeration, I call it the best time of my life. Hitch hiking from Montreal to Calgary was the best possible way to conclude such a significant chapter of my life.
It took me 8 days to cover the 4000km between Montreal and Calgary, and those days were jam packed with laughs, sighs, excitement and frustration. Through substantial periods of dehydration and hunger, I covered the entire way with little more than hand-drawn signs and a smile, and picked up stories every step of the way. I spent 62 hours on the road, 19 of those spent at the roadside, the other 43 split between 12 cars, travelling through 5 provinces and 3 time zones. I met fantastic and bizarre people, cemented friendships, and truthfully had some of the best times I have ever had. The life of a wayfaring wanderer is a good one.

You’re right, Canada, I think have. (Toronto)

Further adventures await! (Jasper National Park)

Day 6: Thunder Bay → Kenora. 490 km, 5 hours.

So, due to poor attention to detail, I posted Day 7 before I posted Day 6, so these two posts are out of order. Sorry about that!

I must have made a sufficiently good impression on the drive from Sudbury to Thunder Bay, because Caitlin (my incredibly lucky lift from the day before) offered me a lift for the next day as well. She was staying with friends in Kenora, near the Ontario-Manitoba border, so our second day driving together was a much shorter drive. Frankly, I was just happy to have a lift right from the start, and the added bonus of not sleeping in a ditch had me in good spirits.

I had not researched hostels in Kenora, so I planned to keep going through if the lift with Caitlin felt as if it had run its course by the end. Thankfully though, we continued to get along well, despite being in each others presence for many consecutive hours, and she suggested I stay at her friend’s place.

While I thought that was a nice gesture, I did not think it likely that her friend would agree to host a potentially smelly hitch hiker she had never met, but Caitlin called ahead and again I was surprised by the hospitality of strangers. She explained that Megan, the host, was in a relationship with ‘the ultimate backpacking hitch hiker dude’, so was happy to support the travelling cause and host the two of us. With that, I had a place to stay for the night, and so the day was established to be the easiest hitch hiking day ever.

Caitlin and I, by the Kakabeka Falls (Thunder Bay)

The drive to Kenora itself was uneventful, with no unpleasant surprises waiting for us. Caitlin had a couple of audiobooks with her, so we decided to start listening through The Poisonwood Bible, which had incidentally been recommended to me by my English teacher 4 years earlier. The recommendation turned out to be a rightful one, as we quickly became enthralled in the characters and their struggles.

It made me think back to that English teacher, and it dawned on me how much of an influence she had been – her reference played a large part in getting me into a volunteer program in India after I left school, her support in my final year had encouraged me to change from physics to English at university, and even a few of her phrases had made their way into my vocabulary. I made a mental note to send her an appreciative email when I next had the chance.

After 5 hours on the road and one crossed timezone, we arrived at Wendy’s house. Similar to Caitlin, Wendy was immediately friendly and likeable, and invited us to join her weekly pot-luck dinner at a friend’s house. We came prepared with corn chips and salsa, but when we arrived, it turned out to be sushi night. While everyone else showed up with crab meat, avocados, carrots, and other assorted sushi-suitable foods, I sat there with chips. My contribution was still welcomed by the host though, and so we made an oh-so-multicultural fusion cuisine dish of sushi with a side of nachos.

There were a handful of people there, the majority of whom were full of fun banter and quick jokes, but one of whom I could not figure out. He was the only other male there, a tall and ungainly fellow named Pat, with a sense of humour that neither fit the audience nor seemed appropriate for any other conceivable situation. His wife was inexplicably beautiful and sweet, with a far more suitable sense of humour, and I found myself genuinely puzzled as to what drew her to him.

Perhaps that was shallow of me, perhaps I was petty in my judgement of him, but I truly did not understand. How did his his sleazy jokes, obsession with correcting others, and achingly boring stories manage to win over a woman who clearly was the object of much admiration? Surely she could have done better than him? But, each to their own, and I chose to take courage from the evident fact that sometimes awkward guys manage to do well for themselves.

I might have been the odd one out, but I was not the misfit. 5 points for guessing who that title went to. (Kenora)

It was about halfway through the evening that the host questioned how it was that I ended up at the pot luck. It was not interrogative, nor had I made myself unwelcome, she simply wondered what my connection was, but was surprised by my answer. ‘So, I get that Caitlin is Megan’s friend,’ she said conversationally as she turned to me, ‘but how do you fit into the equation?’.

‘Oh,’ I replied, thinking it had been explained to her before my arrival, ‘I’m just a hitch hiker Caitlin picked up the other day’. The response around the room was simultaneous and almost identical.

‘Hahahah wait WHAT? Are you serious?’
They genuinely did not believe me, and for a moment I was worried that I may not be so welcome any more. Thankfully, they were not too concerned once the initial surprise has settled down, and we could return to our storytelling. Caitlin later pointed out to me that most of the people there were born-and-bred small town folk, so the prospect of hitch hikers was well outside of their comfort zone. To be fair, that is probably out of most people’s comfort zones, but I was glad I had established myself as good company before being exposed as grimy road-trash.

After a pleasant evening, Caitlin and Megan and I headed back to Megan’s house for the night. It was a small place, and the ‘sleep on the floor’ bed arrangement for me really did mean sleeping on the floor. There was not much padding between my angular bony physique and the equally unyielding floor, but I was happy to be sheltered and grateful to Megan and her hospitality. My family has hosted many people over the years, but we had never hosted a hitch hiker before, let alone at such short notice and so short on space. I added another entry to my extended mental list of favours to pay forward, and promptly fell asleep.

To be continued (with the last entry, exciting times!)