Canada ride- Part II

Southern Canada is a lot like West Virginia.

If you've ever been to West Virginia and drove around, you know what I'm talking about.

I could say more and be pretty descriptive, but I'd be an asshole at the same time, so I'll leave it at that.

Trans-Canadian Hwy 17 cuts through the most deserted land I had ever been on. I've been to the Badlands and I thought that was pretty deserted, but this was worse. There's no gas stations for miles and miles and my bike had a range limited to about 120 miles at 60mph (including reserve). That day, I stretched it to 150 miles at 43mph. As soon as I hit 90 miles on the odo (where I usually expect to go on reserve) I turned on my left turn signal to let him know I hit reserve. Dad hit reserve soon after that and we rode about 10 more miles without any luck for gas stations, so we pulled over and looked at the map. The map showed a few towns, but we had already passed them and didn't see anything advertising a gas station, convenience store, etc. We decided to push on at 40mph to stretch our gas, and would go slower if we had to. The road was pretty deserted anyway, so nobody would really care if we were going that slow. After riding for about an hour at 40mph (panicking the entire way) we finally pulled over to some sort of rest stop and asked someone if there was a gas station nearby. He directed us to the nearest one (about 3 miles away) but it was one that we totally would have missed if we hadn't asked. It was a tiny ESSO establishment on the side of the road with two pumps and a small convenience store.

Now I had never been to Canada before, so I didn't know that full-service gas stations were commonplace there. A young guy about my age came out and grabbed the pump and headed towards our bikes while we just stared at him. As he was about to touch the bike we our staring faces turned into WTF faces and we stopped him before he could open the lids to our tanks. The pumps themselves were some of the oldest I had ever seen, and I thought I'd seen the oldest ones riding through Missouri last year. They of course didn't take credit cards and had the little numbers that flipped over on the display.

While my dad was gassing up the bikes, I went into the convienence store to use the washroom and get something to drink. I couldn't find the bathroom in there, so I asked the lady behind the counter, who was wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off with a picture of a teddy bear holding a flower on it. I was very polite to her when asking, but all I got out of her was "CAN'T YOU READ!? ITS OVER THERE...dumb f'ing Yankee..." I went back and still couldn't find it but a young girl (probably her daughter) led me to the bathroom, embarrassed at her mom's lack of manners. After that I grabbed a drink and realized I didn't know how to pay in Canadian money and forgot the difference between a "toonie" and a "loonie". I just slapped a bunch of cash on the counter and hoped for the best. The crabby lady gave me a look and shook her head and gave me my change and we were back on our way.

So that was my first real encounter with a Canadian in their own territory, and it supported my theory that this area was a lot like West Virginia. Although, if you said "dumb f'ing Yankee" in WV, you'd probably get tar and feathered or shot. Probably the latter.

The rest of Canada 17 was pretty much the same. My next Canadian encounter was with the Canadian DOT...

When Canada repairs a road, they don't do it one lane at-a-time. They rip up the whole freaking road (sometimes 5-10 miles long) and make you follow a pilot truck and ride over loose gravel and mud to get past the construction. If you don't ride, let me remind you that it's not easy to ride a motorcycle through gravel at any speed. It's best to ride through it at 10-25mph, but doing that and trying to balance your bike loaded with luggage and keep it going straight at the same time while there's a line of honking cars behind you isn't fun. I experienced something like this at least four times on my trip through Canada and this was the smoothest construction I had encountered.

We eventually made it up to Thunder Bay (which has great views, similar to Duluth's scenery), but we found out it wasn't that great of a town. We stopped in a hotel and walked about 5 blocks past tons of strip clubs (we couldn't tell if we were in the wrong side of town or not) to a Canadian Applebee's, where I was introduced to Canadian beer and gravy. Molson Canadian isn't too bad, and the famous gravy wasn't bad either. Its basically a heavily spiced brown gravy that Canadians treat like ketchup. It goes on anything ketchup goes on, but I preferred to just use it for my fries.

After that, in the morning we departed for White River, ON.
Continued in Part III.