2019-01-31 Thu

Yesterday Quebec, Today New Brunswick, Tomorrow, Nova Scotia

In theory, eight hours to Truro. If I leave at eight, I can be there by four. Hah hah! (later) No way, José!

I left on the dot of eight; so far so good. Snow blew in great drifts across the road for most of the way from Saint Jean Port Joli to Moncton, if we are going to be honest about this. Dry roads for 50% of the trip, muddy slush slapped into my windscreen by my fellow-travelers for the other half of the trip. Bitterly cold, biting wind. I keep the one-gallon keg of glycol in the cab so that it doesn’t freeze. Hah hah.

I figured on my customary apple to start the day, maybe stop for waffles and bacon and maple syrup around ten. Let me tell you, it is a mistake to leave your apples in the cab overnight. A frozen apple is rock-hard, and is a tricky thing to sink your teeth into when you are wearing snow mittens and passing vehicles are flinging mud in your face. Still, as Chet Atkins said, “It’s better than sex, and almost as good as watermelon”. My water bottle is frozen, so I prop it between the door pillar and the windscreen and watch and listen to it pop and squeak as it melts. I name the puddle “Lac UHaul”.

Thinking of freezing, it dawns on me that the guppies would probably freeze in the hold of the ferry. It’s a six-plus hour cross-channel trip, plus loading and unloading time. I will have to trolley them on board with me to keep them at room temperature. At least I’ll have a chance to explain to people that I’m helping boost depleted fish stocks in Newfoundland. I sure hope they greet me on arrival with a parade of some sort.

Frozen carrot is no better than frozen apple, although its teeth-cleaning properties are superior. Frozen hard-boiled egg is worse. If you don’t grip it well, it ricochets around the cab picking up extra bits of grit that could have been used by mother hen. Too late now.

At 9:00 a.m. I come to a fork in the highway near Riviere du Loup, and the road to the right says “New Brunswick”, which is where I was supposed to be at the start of today’s trip, so on paper I am only an hour behind schedule, but I have lost about six hours on this trip, thanks to the Snow, UHaul, and U-Haul’s snowjob. Time and space and dollar statistics at the end of this log.

The road quits its two-lane each way divided highway status and is now decorated with those “Passing lane 5 Km ahead” signs which no one can read because the plows and trucks have thrown slush onto the signs which signs, being -20c, have grabbed hold of the slush and frozen it to their icy steel flat bosoms. I note with the usual distaste the little white car which sits about fifty feet behind me, too afraid to overtake, but determined to add its length to the fifty-foot gap plus my fifteen-foot length to make an object about one hundred feet long, far to long for the faster vehicles behind the white idiot to pass, and so we form a kindergarten “croc”, with me looking like the culprit, but the real fly in the ointment is the dog-in-the-manger behind me. And sure enough, when we reach the passing lane, Dumbo pulls out and really floors it, inching past me with just enough oomph to get by me at the crest of the hill, ticking off everyone, me included.

I reach the New Brunswick border on the dot of 10:00 and the FM stations change from Quebecois French to New Brunswician French, which is curious since the original Brunswick was in Germany, before it was Germany, if you get my drift, which is still blowing across the bare-naked fields and across the bridge ramparts.

I have a policy on filling up with gas as soon as the gauge drops below a quarter. In this extremely hilly section of New Brunswick (which is to say, right across New Brunswick) this causes consternation as I see the gauge read half-full, then five minutes later a quarter-full, then after another five minutes, half-full again. The penny drops: Going uphill, the tank reads empty, going downhill, full. This truck must have a longitudinal fuel tank with the gauge float at the front end. I could be wrong, but I think my analysis is correct, and there is nothing else to analyze because, once again, I have mislaid my ear buds and so cannot listen to my foreign-language (French, Spanish and Australian) podcasts which I made sure to download this morning.

I listen to FM French radio. The forecast for New Brunswick is continuing snow and continuing cold, dropping to -23c over southern New Brunswick (that is, for the rest of my day) except in low-lying areas, where it should drop to -30c, and I think that is before wind-chill is factored in.

The truck annoys me. It is an automatic, but the gear changes are unorthodox, Cruising speed in Drive is 2,000 RPM, but as I enter the highway and accelerate, revs build up to 4,000+ before top gear will chip in. I can down-shift to 3rd or even 2nd as I approach an off-ramp (engine braking being safer and smoother IMNSHO than disk braking), which is good. Having topped the rise and faced with a clear downhill run, the truck down-shifts from Drive to 3rd automatically as if my mum was in the passenger seat. There is little opportunity to re-use my kinetic energy to gain potential energy on the far side of the river, of which there are many (see “Hilly” above). If this were my fifteen-foot truck I’d trade it in on a 1993 Hyundai Excel sedan.

Think of “4,000 rpm”. If the engine is going around at 4,000 rpm then the crankshaft is going around at 4,000 rpm, which means that the pistons are going up 4,000 times a minute and coming down 4,000 times a minute, which means 8,000 changes of directions, or stops, each minute. Think of the strain on those metal parts roughly sixty times EACH SECOND, hour after hour, day after day.

I gassed up around ten and bought a $10 pair of ear buds. They knotted up mid-afternoon, and I was not game to play cat’s cradle, so it was back to the CBC for me. My name is Adrian Mole.

I stopped off in Fredericton (well actually I took a wrong turn and decided to use the Free WiFi in a Tim Horton’s) and ended up chatting with an old guy whose wife was heading to Gander tomorrow to visit her 84year old sister. He told me “I’ve bought forty bags of potato crisps, should last me until she’s back”, but I hope that he was joking.

After I re-discovered the Trans-Canada Highway I escaped from Fredericton’s grip and set off watching the sun set in my rear-view mirror. One stretch of the highway runs for fifty-five kilometres without a junction where you can pull off to pour a drink, eat a sandwich, or do anything else that you might feel you need to do. What happens if you are low on gas? Darkness fell and I realized the source of some of my stress and headaches these past two nights – the headlamp bulbs are blown. I have been driving on parking lights. Not a big problem when you are on the #401, #20 or #30 with a zillion vehicles lighting your way, but as darkness fell I had difficulty seeing the lane lines. Quite scary for me.

So I stopped in Moncton instead of making Truro. I will start and end in daylight tomorrow, but not before getting the bulbs checked. UHaul really is a despicable firm. And “despicable” is a despicable waste of a legal adjective on such a bunch of crooks.

I ordered meat-lasagna with garlic bread grilled with cheese for supper. I needed cheering-up. At the Moncton Days Inn, the banquet chef (Hi Lucian) makes the lasagnas in individual bowls from scratch and after you have ordered the lasagna for supper, the wait staff bake it, real bake, in an oven, real oven, for 20+ minutes. Most places cut a four-inch square from a tray of frozen factory and then microwave it - the outer layer is hot but the knife goes “ting-ting” on the inner layer. Order the meat lasagna at the Moncton Days Inn is my advice to you.

I am in a warm dry room in Days Inn with a full belly, showered, fresh clothes. The guppies have been fed. I am fatigued and ready to sleep. The smart-phone is on Newfoundland time so I can continue to log my times by the clock without having to fabricate adjustments in a spreadsheet. But then see what trouble that got me in to on Saturday morning .

I muse on UHaul and their one-way rental system. The one-way rental system is not for the benefit of the users; it is to discourage the renting public from returning to the pickup location and beating the shit out of the local managers.

The plan for tomorrow is to pig-out on breakfast in the hotel, then drive to Truro and get the headlights fixed, then on to beddy-byes in North Sydney.