Stroads, across Ontario to Manitoba

Continuing from the last post, on Saturday we left Pembroke, Ontario (west of Ottawa) and travelled as far as Blind River ... where exactly a week before, we'd done out laundry in the laundromat there.  I had a chat with the owner as it was again our laundry day, made easier because I was familiar with the place.  This was the 3rd day of our journey home, and not much progress was made ... we've both gotten progressively more tired, and as an older couple we're not up to travelling 12 hours a day.  Eight or nine is about our limit.

We've cast off all interest in stopping for any reason, and this has helped us get to Winnipeg, today.  It helped enormously that it's the August long weekend, so that much of the construction that held us up on our way out east was "on vacation" yesterday and today.  Yesterday we had trouble finding a hotel at the end of the day, however, which drove us to drive later than usual, until reaching Thunder Bay.  It's always possible to find a room in a good-sized city.

We're treating ourselves to a prestige hotel room tonight.  There's just a day and a half left between us and Calgary ... and yet we're considering staying a second night in Winnipeg, just to rest before pushing home.  This is, after all, our 17th straight day of driving.

It's been something of a vision quest for me.  Travelling this way is today is very different from earlier trips I once took in the 1970s and 80s, with my parents and on my own.  Cruelly, we've encountered an identical culture across the country.  It's all too often that I've felt, looking at the streets and houses, that I'm still in Calgary.  This is particularly true of the "stroads" that are absolutely everywhere.  These are often criticised for the inconvenience and dangers they offer pedestrians, making neighbourhoods "unwalkable," but I'd like to add a point or two of my own.

Some 40 years ago, the creation of a "gasoline alley" began to appear in most mid-sized towns, where a service road was built alongside a highway featuring gas stations, fast-food joints and other shops, surrounded by pads of concrete.  From our travels, most of these side routes have disappeared, to be replaced by four or six-lane stroads where such businesses, supported by the addition of large box stores, line both sides of the street.  If a traveller needs to visit a supermarket, or buy a new pair of pants, or get some part of the car fixed or looked at, it's now necessary to wade into the time-wasting "car seas" these areas create.

From a driver's point of view, the problem is too much access from parking lots to street, with persons wishing to make both right and left turns from every driveway.  The frustration that comes from waiting to merge drives many drivers to shoot out in a mad rush to avoid having to wait ... usually forcing some other driver to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.  This snarls and backs traffic all over the stroad's area — which is maddening.

Time and again, Tamara and I have been dragged into such areas by following Google Maps, which makes no distinction between one important road and another.  Thus, just wanting to get from one highway to another, we've been plunged into enough of these areas to hesitate entering any sizable city for any reason, if we can help it.  It's faster to divert five miles our of our way, along country roads, that get enmeshed in these institutional traffic jams.

They are a blight.  They've chewed up dozens of towns that, once upon a time, an outsider might have visited ... but now there's nothing to see, and nothing to do there, that one cannot do ten minutes from one's own house, anywhere in the country.  It's wrecked my interest in urban travel.  The truly best parts of our journey has been those driving through great isolated backcountry areas, because there's still nature to see.

And this hurts me, I think.  I have fond memories of my first trips to Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg, when these places were so different from home.  But now these places are just cookie-cutter versions of Calgary.  I have no reason to go there.  And I don't think I'll ever take a trip like this again.  Something has died, and in ways I feel this trip has been my opportunity to view and identify the body.