TBT #65: Road Trip!

Let me set the scene for you.

It is the end of October in our fourth year of university. Those of us who have decided to take their education seriously — i.e. not me, but I find myself feeling sympathy pains nonetheless — are faced with stacks and stacks of books and a calendar of due dates so packed it kind of makes one want to curl up into a ball and listen to Moonlight Sonata on repeat until the rapture hits. To understate: People are stressed. Like mega-stressed. Like drive-all-your-friends-away-with-erratic-behaviour call-your-mother-in-tears the-cops-found-you-naked-in-the-park-calling-yourself-Polonius kind of stressed. Added to that, the leaves are changing colours and the weather is getting bitterly cold at night and you just know that one day you’re going to wake up and there’s going to be snow on the ground and it’s going to be minus-fifty degrees outside and you’ll need a team of dogs, a sled, three sherpas and an ice-pick just to get to class. And as a final insult, one night, totally without warning, time will go in reverse. Just to spite you.

Look, I like autumn as much as the next guy. It’s one of my favourite seasons. But it’s hard to ignore the consequences of the season; it’s hard to ignore what it all leads to. There’s a reason they call it fall — some feel it is because it represents the transition from the swinging and sultry fun of summertime to the desperate agony that is winter. Others feel it is because the leaves literally fall from the trees. Still others theorize that the season is named in tribute to the Albert Camus novel “The Fall” (La Chute) wherein, through a series of monologues, a self-proclaimed ‘judge penitent’ Jean-Baptiste Clamence reflects upon his life to a stranger.¹ This, however, is unlikely.

But it’s hard. That is what I am trying to get across to you today. It is not the easiest time of the year for anyone, but for fourth-year university students it can be especially harsh. And as we are now at the age where binge-drinking no longer offers the heady feeling of relief that it once did, we must look elsewhere for distraction from school work. The more obvious thing to do would be to start doing, say, crack-cocaine. Or perhaps starting with cocaine and then progressing to crack-cocaine and then maybe topping all that off with some opiates or maybe crystal meth. And then I guess we could ride the snake for a while, though I am not entirely sure what that entails exactly. But, while that may seem like an attractive option to many of you, I’ve always had a problem with illegal drugs. And my problem is this: I do not know where to get illegal drugs. And also, I am morally against them.

It is kind of a chicken-or-the-egg thing.

So there was only one option, really, when we were planning our October. Only one possible way to give us something to look forward to. We needed a beacon to get us through the month. And the character of the beacon was obvious. We needed to follow in the footsteps of Lewis & Clark, Jay & Silent Bob, and a bunch of other apt examples. We needed to go on a road trip.

And a road trip is what we went on.

Renting a Car is Easier Than Everything

I always thought renting a car would be difficult. I figured there would be lots of paperwork and extensive background checks. Because, you know, it’s a car. It is over a ton of metal, capable of reaching speeds close to or beyond 100 miles per hour, and represents the #1 cause of preventable death in the Western World². At the very least I expected it to not be cheap.

But I was wrong. It was cheap *AND* easy. Or, if you will, cheapsy. For the one-time fee of about-what-you-would-pay-for-a-cab-to-the-airport, we were able to rent this car. As you can see we had a medium-sized gray car with what I assume to be an engine under the ‘hood’. It also had lights and doors, vital components to any road-ready vehicle³.

So on Saturday morning we set off for our road trip. Beginning our journey at 9 a.m., I kind of looked like hell. Danielle, however, looked like she was ready to go knock on some doors and tell people about the Good News. With the two of us and Mike in the back seat, and Kristine and Bryan up front, we all sung songs and pointed out the foliage until half the car started to feel like they might vomit.

Nova Scotia’s highway 3, in addition to being very scenic, is also incredibly twisty and turny. We made a number of stops in order to combat any carsickness, and I am happy to report we were successful. It helped that we were given many opportunities to stop, such as when Mike yelled “BLUE CANOE”, pointed excitedly and then instructed Bryan to stop the car. Blue Canoe is a gas station convenience store. It is, however, a newly branded gas station convenience store. Which means in addition to your standards food-and-drinks, it also has pictures of people on the wall. Was our shopping experience enhanced in any way by the people on the wall, all smiling and backdropped by bright colours? The answer is yes, but only because that kid eating the ice cream sandwich is hilarious. It’s all “man, this is going to be awesome. But wait, what is that over there?”

Satisfied that we had experienced all there is to experience regarding the Blue Canoe — potential slogan: nothing says gas station convenience like a blue canoe — we hit the road again. Each of us prepared driving CDs to get us through the day. Except a) Mike wasn’t able to download the songs he wanted in time, b) Danielle’s computer was built by the Pennsylvania Amish and is thus cursed and filled with oak and I really wouldn’t want her to try anything as complicated as burning a CD on that thing, and c) Bryan’s CD did not burn right and instead just played various snippets of Billy Joel’s “Tell Her About It” on every track to the point where I wished Bryan would make like Billy Joel and drive the car into a suburban California home.⁴ So we only ended up with two CDs: mine, which I have to say was pretty good in that it featured such tracks as Fastball’s “The Way” and the Mighty Mighty Bosstone’s “Never Had to Knock on Wood”, and Kristine’s disc, which — though good — kind of brought down the mood with that Cat’s in the Cradle song and Bob Marley’s Redemption Song.

But not even Little Boy Blue and the Man in the Moon could keep us down for long, as we pulled into our breakfast place in high spirits. I have to say, if you happen to be driving around Nova Scotia and you see OUTBACK DINER & COFFEE SHOP, you should definitely stop in! While I guess we were too early to experience any of the Outback atmosphere — I bet they have, like, dingos and koala bears scurrying about during the evening hours — we did get a surprisingly good breakfast, which we ate while sitting on weirdly ornate chairs. Seriously, look at the craftsmanship on that thing. They must have used a lathe.⁵

First Stop

Our first stop was Mahone Bay, a destination eagle-eye readers might remember from last year’s road trip, wherein Rory O’Sullivan, Kristine, myself and others set out to visit what the locals refer to as simply “The Bay” during a particularly dull frosh week. Mahone Bay is kind of an in-between town, lying in between Halifax and Lunenberg. That’s not to say it’s not worth visiting, however, because you can get some great pictures in front of churches. Look at all those churches. There are three of them! Why would anyone need so many places to talk to God?

When you look through the pictures, you may think that all we did in Mahone Bay was stand around and take pictures. This is only true if you ignore the time when we went to the bathroom.⁶

Destination Two

After that fun picture-taking time, we were on the road again. Look, it’s cows on a hill! And those cows on a hill meant something to all of us. In addition to being a bunch of slow-moving land mammals standing atop a weird treeless hill, they were also a symbol. A symbol making an announcement. An announcement that said “Hey, you arrived.”

I’ve kept our main motivation for this trip secret up until this point. To be truthful, I was a little wary of figuring out how to explain this without coming off as something of a weird-ass guy. However, if you’ve read this far, past a bunch of digressional paragraphs and SIX entirely unnecessary footnotes, I think it’s fair that I share this information with you. The main reason we rented a car, got up early on a Saturday, drove what I can guess was about 150 kilometres and brought changes of socks was this:

We were going cranberry picking.

That’s right. We set out with buckets into the vast cranberry fields in Lunenberg, taking advantage of what is the only you-pick cranberry farm in the province of Nova Scotia.

Now, cranberries today are no longer picked by anyone. From what I know — and I think it’s safe to say I am an expert now that I have visited a real live cranberry farm — they are planted, grown and then, when harvest time comes, the field itself is flooded. The cranberries then float to the top and they are retrieved by what I assume is a modified version of that machine that sucks up golf balls at the driving range. You can actually see a flooded crop on the left side of this picture, where Mike, Kristine and Danielle are walking with gusto generally reserved for Tarantino movies.

Actually stepping onto the field and picking a cranberry made me appreciate why they switched to the machine method. these fields were MUDDY. And VAST. They were VASTLY MUDDY. You’re essentially standing on a soft layer of plant-life, giving the ‘ground’ — that actually isn’t a ground — a very soft spongy feeling. As such, I mostly hung back and took pictures of people with better shoes.

I was never one to think I would go cranberry picking and I would be lying if I said it would be something I would jump at the chance to do, but at the same time it was experience I’m glad I had. It was bitterly cold, muddy and the cranberries themselves seemed kind of sparse, but, honestly, how many people get to say they went CRANBERRY PICKING during their time at university? Not many, I bet. And, even more importantly, how many people find friends that are willing to do something as ridiculously out-of-sorts as going cranberry picking on a weekend when they could and should be doing any number of more ‘important’ things? So when I say that cranberry picking isn’t something I’d do again, I only mean that in the sense that I don’t exactly think it’d be a great thing to do with my family or, like, on a first date. I would, however, go with them again.

Straight on Home

After we got our cranberries weighed — two buckets (they take up the whole freezer!) — and Danielle and Mike had a conversation we spent a little more time in Lunenburg. I had never been before, but had heard all about it as it is World Heritage Site or something, which essentially means that if you’re a guy with a great idea for a shoe store that is shaped like a shoe or a hotel where people sleep in hammocks suspended from a giant umbrella that twirls slowly into the night, you should not go to Lunenburg. It also means that it is kinda pretty.⁷

We were all tired at this point in the day, so we only stayed in the ‘burg (as the locals call it) — long enough to grab a quick lunch — and whistle at our food –, take some more random pictures, get some Halloween cookies and, finally, pretend to be street signs.

The ride back home was quiet and uneventful. I took a picture of the clock in the car for some reason. If my math is right, we had been on the road for some six-and-a-half hours at that point. You don’t need be a math genius to figure out that that is a long time! Though the sun wasn’t setting and, in fact, there was another four hours of shopping at Bayer’s Lake followed by three or four hours of Halloween costume making to come (Historians may refer to it as the “day that would not end”), this marked the end of our road trip. We returned with more cranberries that any group of university students could ever need, a bunch of photographs that I kind of like and an experience that you suckers will probably never get to have.

That’s right, bitches. I picked cranberries. On the streets they call me the cran picker. But you… — you can call me lucky.

All the photos from the trip can be seen here. Enjoy!

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¹ I was really hoping I’d be able to find a guy named, like, Peter J. Fall that I could use to make this joke, but Fall does not seem to be a common last name. So I made a joke about a French existentialist. I will understand if you do not laugh at it.
² I do not know if this is actually true. The #1 cause of preventable death may, in fact, be cancer. Which to my knowledge is something that even the richest men cannot rent.
³ I am only pretending to know nothing about cars for the purposes of hilarity! In fact, our car was a Mitsubishi. A Mitsubishi something-or-other.
⁴ This is ‘topical’ humour, by which I mean it is based on relatively current events. I do not mean that this is the kind of humour you would apply to a skin rash. That would be stupid and likely only provide a mild placebo effect.
⁵ I am aware they probably would not use a lathe for this sort of thing, but can you imagine a chair, on a lathe, just spinning around like nobody’s business? It’s a pretty great image.
⁶ I also got kind of arty with my shots in Mahone Bay. This picture, of Bryan, is meant to symbolize his kind of looking like a muppet in this picture. And this shot taken through a mirror, is meant as a metaphor for the duality of man.
⁷ I may not know a lot about history, being only a fourth-year undergraduate history major and all, but I do know that a gazebo is a sure sign of historical relevance. Especially in Canada.

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