Road Trip

There are 21 posts tagged Road Trip (this is page 3 of 4).

Queen Annes Lace


Queen Annes Lace on a Dirt Road
Originally uploaded by That Canadian Grrl

This is my own photo taken earlier this week. I love getting out there and finding the old farmhouses. But the road trip is part of the whole package too. The wildflowers and scenery make the trip beautiful. How can someone live in the same place and never get out and see more of the world. How deprived!

Scrolling Saturday: April 2005.

For Scrolling Saturday I have unearthed this old post:

Maps for Road Tripping April 29, 2005

I love road trips, the campier, the crazier and the longer – the better. To overly plan a road trip is to spoil it. You may have an ultimate destination but it’s the journey that really counts. Take time to get lost. Wander. Make frequent stops for no good reason. Coffee, knickknacks, tourist traps, farmers markets, flea markets, fresh honey, odd road signs, adventure and other things so essential to life yet so often overlooked for lack of ‘time’.

You may wonder why a road tripper ever needs a map. Let alone a collection of them. I do love them, they make the trip that much more fun. Mainly, you absolutely must have the backroad maps to wherever you may be wandering. Should you get hopelessly lost (lucky you!), as you’re laughing, sipping roadside coffee and wondering how you ended up so far to the left, a good road map will be your guide to possible alternative routes. Never take the map seriously though. There are always glitches. You’ll find them as you drive along and realize the map never had this road or that turn or that dead end approaching right in front of your car bumper. That is the odd thing about maps, they are imperfect but trying so hard to be correct. Maps are friendly and confused, so very likeable.

I think of maps as those drawings from the early explorers. Those men who trekked out to places completely unknown and tried to draw a guide to what they were seeing. Not just flora and fauna but rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys and everything else they stumbled upon. Ancient explorers were the earliest road trippers. Before cars, there were ships. Before ships there were horses. Before horses there were just people walking around wishing they knew how long it was to the next grocery store for snackage. No, just kidding, you knew there were no grocery stores back then, right?

The first maps were wonky. They didn’t have perspective and distances were not measured equally. Now we have science which has given us exacting measurements and the tools to create beautifully detailed maps. Cartography and related sciences are things modern road tripping types can be grateful for. Think of them next time you’re looking for the right house on the right street in the right town.

Now, go, take your itchy feet, let the wanderlust possess you. Take along a map, it’s like a good friend who will never laugh at your navigational skills.
Road Map Collectors Association
International Map Collector’s Society
History of Cartography

Unexpected News from a Fortune Cookie

Good cheer will lighten your burdens

I have the good cheer is that why I keep getting burdens? Funny how a fortune cookie just gives you these little tidbits and leaves you hanging for the real answers.

Things are slow in the man-stalking project. I found his postal code but no apartment number. Kind of useless to send a card that way. I was writing out my Xmas cards (just addressing the envelopes so far) and I do still have three blank ones. One could be sent to Mr. Pirate Smile. If I knew his full address. I have two days off work starting now pretty much. I was thinking about taking the bus out to Zellers and seeing if Mr. Pirate Smiley’s place is on that part of the street. I could just wander into the lobby and take a look for the mailbox of a certain pirate. I don’t think you can get arrested for that. Funny to be concerned when here I am Madame Trespasser when it comes to the abandoned houses.

I know I’m not the only romantic geek woman. But, it does seem silly to create a whole scene in my mind where the pirate smile and the trespasser are making muffins at home on a cold winter’s day. It was nice. Fun and he was quite lovely. Not a great baker… but he smiled a lot and that made up for his lack of skill with muffins. Silly, but it was nice. Something to do when you’re pretty much stuck at work for 8 hours. Better than thinking about how aggravating it is to be without a car, still.

Also, in spite of what they tell you, I don’t see how taking the bus/ taxi route is saving money compare to having a car. I’m spending $20 a day for bus/taxi to get back and forth to work. A tank of gas for the car might be more than that but it would last a lot longer than one day. I could even get to the grocery store, take a road trip and still have enough gas for the week of going back and forth to work. I wish my brother would get the lead out of his tank and let me get on with the car situation. I think I’m going to end up not having a driver’s license at all. I have to go back to the teen/ beginner class and do the written test if I can’t get the road test done by my birthday. I can’t see myself passing that written test. I lucked out taking it in the US the first time. It was pretty simple and even then I didn’t pass with flying colours.

Life is frustrating right now and then you start your period. Oh goodie. At least I’m not totally depressed like I was last night. Should have known it was going to start when I was that down. So close to just getting up and leaving at work, last night. Just thinking about the car and license stuff… Payday is Friday. If I can I wonder if I could just buy something myself. Not sure how to do it at all. I’d have less than a thousand but it would be cash. I could do payments with someone other than Graham. After all, last thing he really seemed to say about it was that he would start looking again when the weather cleared up. And… it’s WINTER! When does that mean he is going to leave it till, spring thaw??? I will go insane long before then. I’m sure I will quit the job. I have spending so much on getting there and then not being able to do anything. Like being caught in a prison just cause I don’t want to spend so much on a taxi or freeze waiting for buses that always take half an hour to come no matter when you get to the bus stop.

I think I should just go for the coffee making now. Thinking about all this will keep me up anyway. Sleep is so over rated. I bet pirate smile is sleeping now…

Be Your Own Lion Tamer

Some days you have to be your own lion tamer. Be the one who cracks the whip at yourself, even if as you growl menacingly and threaten to scratch your own eyes out. Be brave. Face yourself. Make yourself get to work whether you like it or not.

Pay day is today. Always makes it a bit harder to go in there for the shift. I’d rather be out there spending some of that freshly gathered loot. I want to buy a pair of walking boots for winter wear. I need to return the modem from my old Internet account and call Bell to attempt to get one of those monkeys to fix the account this time (it’s only been since July that I’ve been trying to get the monkeys to fix it). I’d rather take my camera and go out into the wide world, maybe in the general direction of Peterborough this time. Wouldn’t it be much more fun to take photos of old houses and have a road trip today?

Sure it would. That’s why you just have to be your own lion tamer some days. Get yourself doing the things you don’t really want, care or feel like doing.

Rrrrr!

October Babbling

I don’t know why it seems like such an effort to write anything the past couple of months. Maybe I’m confusing myself with a bear, thinking I’m going into hibernation. Whatever it is I’m not going to win any prizes for keeping my blog going.

Tonight is the last day of my working week. I have Tuesday and Wednesday off. Already making some plans for a road trip. Anyone know of an abandoned house on the way south to the town of Simcoe? I was going to try the Orangeville area as I have a few around there which I have been intending to get to. I think I will have my own car for November so that will make the road trip plan easier as I will only need to arrange my own time and gas money.

I lost my password for Ubuntu so now I have to delete the whole thing and reinstall it just to do anything at all with it. Why does it make you have a damned password in the first place? Will it blow up if someone else looks at it? I don’t have a password on my computer so I really do not want one on anything else. It’s like those stupid car alarms. They only person they go off on is the owner of the car. If anyone was actually stealing the car they would never go off at all. (Or they would be ignored). People really need to get rid of some of their issues with needing security. If you really feel that paranoid hire your own personal body guard. Hire one to stand around all day and guard your car and another for the computer and another for the bathroom in case someone doesn’t flush.

At least you’d be helping out your community by offering employment to people who might have been passed over at the local telemarketing company or McDonalds. Go you! But you may need a second job yourself to pay for all that security. Still, you’d always have someone hanging around, protecting you, your privacy and your goods and services and whatever other flotsam and jetsam.

I think it would be like getting suffocated with your own security blanket. I know it would drive me crazy.

Soon time for the working day. Sunday was kind of an easy day. Nearly all the calls were just reboots. Monday isn’t likely to be so easy. Most people save up their really big messes for Monday. Meanwhile Saturday is when all the lunatics phone. I guess that’s the day the guard at the asylum has off.