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Another map, this time of the United States. I've been on umpteen road trips through the States in my lifetime, many with my parents and brothers in our trusty Volkswagen campervan when I was growing up in Winnipeg, and -- thankfully -- many without them!! When I was young, most of the trips were for the purpose of visiting relatives in Michigan, Illinois, and Kentucky, but we did cover a lot of territory in the surrounding states. Counting the cousins, aunts, and uncles, it was a large-scale production for all of us to head to one place, but when you're a kid, all you have to worry about is coercing as many relatives as possible to buy you loot -- candy, souvenirs, clothing -- without them cottoning on just how many of them you've hit up.
When we moved to B.C. when I was 13, that campervan sadly took its last journey from Winnipeg and did not survive a rather spectacular highway accident near the Saskatchewan/Alberta border. (I was spared, but my younger brother ended up in Regina hospital for a month and my dad had stitches in his head.) You don't see those Volkswagens much anymore, but I have fond memories of that combi-van, as they call them in Oz, the ones with the pop-up top. I travelled with a Dutch guy and a Scottish guy from Melbourne to Sydney in one of those. I've been told you can drive that stretch in 12 hours, but we took two weeks. See, we kept having to stop because we'd have to keep refilling the little fridge with beer. Then we'd deplete our stock in a matter of hours and would be too drunk to drive, so we'd stop again... stories for another day...
In 1988, my dad bought this great '83 Volvo wagon and the five of us took a road trip to Southern California. We were older then, teenagers, and not having the space of the campervan made everyone squirrelly and the three of us in the back were constantly on the verge of maiming each other.
Something possessed my father to buy a Jeep Cherokee SUV some years back -- something evil I say -- and I acquired the Volvo wagon. I did a big favour for him, but I got the better end of the deal, I'm certain. Seven-odd years later, I still have the Volvo, having poured a fair amount of dosh into it after 2000 when its age started to show. My mechanics in Sechelt know it intimately, but say it's still a great vehicle and it's built like a tank. Two years ago I was coming home from L.A. and the plane was late arriving into Sea-Tac Airport, so I was caught in a snowstorm in the middle of the night near Bellingham, spinning out on black ice on the I-5 and crashing headlong into the steel highway girders. Amazingly, very little happened to the car, and nothing happened to me. The headlights remained intact, the hood was only slightly crumpled, although the grille was nowhere to be seen -- Idaho, maybe? ICBC covered it, and I made $50 out of the deal, since my deductible was $200, and the adjuster cut me a cheque for $250 for the cosmetic damage on the bumper (read: barely a scrape on the rubber). When the car's 20 years old, you're not about to send it off for something you can barely see. I got my money's worth out of that Volvo, though, taking it on road trips, camping, moving furniture, people, animals, you name it. I take it on forest service roads to go camping, which is why there are so many pock marks on the windshield. My friend Serg says it looks like someone tried to assassinate me.
The Volvo's also got another seat in the back that fits two people -- kids, ideally, or stunted-growth adults -- so it can legally take seven people, better than any SUV. Plus, it's got a turning circle that I have never seen on any other vehicle -- it can turn on a dime. OK, at the risk of sounding like a Volvo used car dealer, I would say it's the ultimate all-purpose vehicle. It's running fine, but I can't bear to part with it, even though I'm in the car co-op now and have a transit U-Pass. So I've assigned my brother as the principal driver as the car is better suited to their growing family in Surrey, not here in downtown Vancouver, where it sits in a parking stall for a week at a time.
Back to the U.S. road tripping -- I've seen a lot of the U.S., but I haven't included the states that I mainly just passed through to get to another state. I've rented cars, rented cars with other people, caught lifts with other travellers, taken the Volvo, but didn't hitchhike anywhere (only a bit in Canada, and *LOTS* in Australia and New Zealand). Also, I didn't do any driveaways -- the system where you sign up with a driveaway company and you take a vehicle from Point A to Point B -- as it was never convenient for me, but I know of lots of people who've used them. I never seem to have enough time off to take a leisurely drive, so I usually fly. What I would like to do is drive all the way across the country, all the way to the Atlantic provinces, but I would need a helluva long time for that trip.
