The long drive

Have to say I love the long drive.

That is one thing I have in common with my dear father.

He likes the long drive too.

After he had the auxiliary tanks fitted out for the motor home he was able to do the Great Lakes Circle Tour in a day and a half, where mere mortals thought two and a half weeks was a good time.

I've never left the old boy much reason to swell with pride at the thought of me, but he'd be proud of this; I made it from the door of ex-wife 2 to the door of my daughter's place in res at Trent University in exactly one minute under two hours.

Look at a map and figure that out!

Quite a few times when the co-spawn of ex-wife 2 and myself were living in Ontario and I was still at the Irving shipyard in Saint John I made the Saint John to Guelph trip in under 13 hours. In fact, I once nailed it just under 12!

Those were painful times. A twelve and a half hour drive and a four hour visit with my children and then twelve and a half hours back to fitting pipe-hangers aboard the good ship HMCS Vancouver.

But I digress. The long drive.

Paul Newman and I once did the Calgary-Toronto run in well under 30 hours. We were driving Paul's Grand Marquis. That right there is a sign of the times, isn't it?

What car company nowadays would have the audacity to market something called a "Grand Marquis?"

"Oh, I see you are piloting a Grand Mar Kiss, so I assume you are a total twat!"

But Pauli and I took turns and kept the hammer down and by God we set a personal best on that Calgary - Toronto jaunt.

The one highlight of the trip will forever be the pedal-to-the-metal 20 laps around a boarded-up gas station in North Ontario with an OPP cruiser in hot pursuit. I'm driving and the g-forces wake Paul up and he says "you're not playing ring-around-the-service-station, are you?"

Of course not... go back to sleep... meanwhile, the last lap I did I see fuckface the uber-keen OPP recruit has piled the cruiser into the snow berm, and we're good to carry on down that trans-Canada highway!

And I still like the long drive. What's even more fucked up is that my father still has his driving license, and he still revels in the long drive.

Not that long ago I was heading back home from a wedding in Montreal. I'm cruising at about 140 kph, and there's this motor home looming bigger and bigger in the rear-view... oh there it goes, he's well ahead of us now...

Talk to you when I catch up with ya, Dad...

The long drive...

Are we all Kerouac's children or what?