The power meter on my laptop indicates that I have over 5 hours of battery life. Nice. I'm appreciating the new battery already. Being on a plane, battery is key - especially since I forgot my headphones so watching a movie isn't really an option (I refuse to pay for a crappy set from the airline). Seems like a good opportunity to blog now (June 6) and post later.

Flying from Vancouver to Montreal is like retracing my steps. For the portion of the flight where the earth below is not blanketed by clouds, the landscape brings back memories of our drive across the country about five years ago. In ten days we drove the roughly 3000 kilometers across Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. Now, I'm doing that same trip in reverse and in about 1/50 of the time. 

I don't even want to think about what that time savings equates to in additional carbon emissions - I just finished reading a discouraging article in the Economist about the failure to implement appropriate economic policies to combat climate change in the US. The article got me thinking about what my flight would actually cost if the externalities associated with the greenhouse gas emissions were included in the price of my ticket. I like the idea of purchasing offsets, but I never do - just one more step in the whole ticket buying process that I can't be bothered with. And if I, a self-labelled pragmatic environmentalist, doesn't take the time needed to research reputable offsetting firms and effectuate the transaction, I'm pretty sure the average person isn't doing it either. I digress.

Our cross-country road trip was great. Great in the sense that Kevin and I were launching into the unknown together and because we got to experience the vastness and diversity and beauty that is Canada firsthand. A five hour flight doesn't adequately convey how expansive Canada is. Being a tourist in one's own country shatters a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions (the prairies aren't that flat - who knew?), confirms others (most of Canada is the middle of nowhere) and helps lends credibility and legitimacy to the declaration "I am Canadian".

One thing that we didn't establish in our travels is the point in central Canada where the children's game I've always known as "mokey in the middle", involving a ball being thrown between two children in an effort to keep a third child from catching it, changes name. Living in BC, I discovered that it is called "piggie in the middle" by western Canadians, in contrast to "monkey in the middle" by eastern Canadians. The point at which it transitions from one to the other remains a mystery, but some non-scientically conducted interviews suggest that it may be somewhere in Saskatchewan.

Some of the most memorable moments of our trip are not necessarily those associated with stops at tourist destinations. The brilliant blue lakes and glaciers of Banff, the golden wheat fields in southern Alberta, the invigorating hot springs in Radium, the big sky of Saskatchewan, and the appropriately-named Great Lakes of Ontario were all highlights and are well-represented in our photos (which were taken on 35mm since we didn't have a digital camera at the time, so I won't be including any here), but my main memories revolve around experiencing new things and overcoming challenges together. Here are a two vivid memories (strong memories tend to make the best stories, in my opinion) centered on some of the challenges:

I

We camped all the way across Canada. The tent I bought at Zellers for $79.99 was our accommodation for the trip, for reasons related to both budget and flexibility. The flexibility component enabled us to set our itinerary one day at a time, without rushing from one reservation to the next. One issue with our chosen approach was that some of the campgrounds we had identified on the map as potential stops for the night were full by the time we arrived. Our planned stop in western Ontario became a mad hunt for a campsite in eastern Manitoba (speaking of Manitoba, I think I'm flying over it right now). 

By the time we found one, it was dusk and big, dark storm clouds were looming. No sooner did we pull into the campsite did it start raining. Not sprinkling, raining. Setting up camp in the rain after a long day on the road is enough to test the limits of any relationship. But, we managed to string up the tarp and pitched the tent and went to bed. 

That night and the following morning when we couldn't get the Coleman stove to light and thus didn't have our oatmeal or tea were miserable. But, looking back on it, we laugh. It was worse at the time than in retrospect and I think the old adage "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" applies in this case.

An aside: the water in the campground tasted bad despite being deemed potable. Based on this one sample, Kevin concluded that water in Manitoba tastes like crap. Perhaps he's creating stereotypes and misconceptions about Canada to replace those that were abandoned through the course of our journey.

II

We drove Kevin's 1990 Acura Legend all the way across Canada. Besides being quite rusty (Montreal winters will do that to a car), the car was in decent shape. Kevin knows his way around a car  and he's very thorough when it comes to vehicle maintenance and so spent some time every evening poking around under the hood to see that everything was holding together. On the evening we stopped in southern Alberta at Writing on Stone provincial park, after driving for a few hours through endless fields of grain, a robin helped Kevin with the vehicle maintenance by picking out the hundreds of dead grasshoppers that had become embedded in the radiator grill and eating them. Symbiosis in action. That same evening, a doe and her fawn wandered through our campsite and I learned something new about Kevin: he's scared of large herbivores.

Later in our trip, as we made the final push to Vancouver through the hot and arid interior of BC, the Acura met its match. In sweltering 35°C heat, we left Kelowna along the Coquihalla, which we were told was the faster route. It's faster, but it's also much more isolated and traverses much less forgiving terrain than the TransCanada. 

Kevin had asked me to monitor the engine temperature gauge as we climbed through the Rockies and I continued doing so for the remainder of the trip (some would say that paranoia is one thing we have in common).  At one point, as the car struggled up an incline, the temperature gage starting rising. Kevin asked me to turn on the heat, which didn't seem to make any sense because we were already roasting, but apparently we didn't have time to spare for explanations and the request became a command. I turned on the heat. Nothing changed. The gauge continued to climb. We passed a few cars that were leaking coolant onto the road because their radiators had succumbed to the heat. Our fate, should we continue, became clear. We pulled over. 

Kevin threw open the hood, and I asked "now what?". We only had one option - wait-and-see. I don't particularly appreciate wait-and-see (I can relate to an episode of Family Guy where Stewie protests the wait-and-see approach because when Jim Henson adopted it, the result was "wrong-sounding muppets"). I prefer diagnose-and-act. 

Sitting on the side of the road in the sweltering heat, stressed and nervous, we waited. The temperature gauge descended slowly. As it dropped, I asked "can we go now?", to which Kevin responded negatively and proceeded to describe the consequences if we pushed the engine without allowing it to cool down. We waited longer. Finally, Kevin deemed that we could continue but we had to leave the heat on. Not ideal, but better than breaking down on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.

The Acura made it to Vancouver and hung in there for a few more years. Kevin finally gave it up just over a year ago and now we're proud members of the Cooperative Auto Network.