We Started at the Piggly Wiggly (Pt. 2)

After that, we had no idea where we’d go

This story is continued from part 1, found here: We Started at the Piggly Wiggly. After that we had no idea where we… | by S.K. Shandlin | Globetrotters | Aug, 2022 | Medium

The highlight of our first day out of Winnipeg was scones. We found a little backstreet bake shop in Brandon, Manitoba, where they had just come from the oven — warm, rich with blueberries, covered in butter. We had never heard of them! Small thing but life-changing! Before Brandon, scone ignorance. After Brandon, scone knowledge. Sometimes it is the little things.

Breakfast was when we planned our day. The atlas was our Bible, a daily touchstone. We’d calculate the miles we might cover that day, project where we might find a place to stay, then consider diversions or side trips or stops that we might engage. We didn’t worry much about time. Somehow a 5-week window of time let us forget there was a time window at all.

We decided to camp in Moose Jaw. We liked the name. It was a four-hour shot straight west on a beautiful day. Hum of the engine, wind through the windows, smell of grass and grain, almost no other cars on the road on a vast Canadian plain. We had fun searching the radio dial, and just as much turning the radio off to read to the driver.

In Moose Jaw we met a French girl who was hitchhiking to Vancouver. She joined us for a beef stew supper, then beat us in Scrabble. Three times. While drinking wine. We found it ironic.

We enjoyed the quiet night in the campground so much we stayed another night — Friday night. Apparently, every working man and woman in Moose Jaw goes camping, and carousing, and drinking on Friday night. It was not quiet, but it was fun and camaraderie and plenty of beer.

Before we left, we borrowed a canoe and floated down the Moose Jaw River. By ten o’clock the sun had burned off the mist and warmed the air. Sunshine filtered through the trees, dust motes floated through the angled rays, insects danced on the shimmering surface. The only sounds were lapping water, rustling leaves, and birds calling over the prairie. We were two thousand miles from home with nothing to do, nowhere to go, in the midst of a summer which seemed to have no end. There was no place better to be than here and no reason to be anywhere else. We sat for a few minutes in the cool shadow of a bridge, looking out on a world of golds and greens under a dome of blue, cotton clouds floating above the trees. We stayed there until the sun topped the trees and found us. Time to move on. We paddled back to the campground, dismantled our camp, tossed it into the Toyota, and headed for Calgary.

The canoe ride was the apex of the trip. Until then we hadn’t thought a bit about an ending. We were truly away, traveling a day at a time. Heading to Calgary, somehow we realized the adventure would end. Not a bad thing, but a different thing.

You can see forever on the Canadian plains. You can see weather coming. We were driving in full sun west of Medicine Hat when Lynn said, “Look at that!” Far off to the northwest a dark, rolling thunderhead split the prairie, its western tail extending below the horizon. To the east, pillowed clouds, blue sky, and sunshine. Emerging from the driving rain into brilliant sun were six orange and black Canadian National locomotives pulling the longest chain of freight cars I had ever seen. They tapered into the distance, disappearing into gray and mist, new cars slowly emerging as the engines pulled them east, as if they were coming from the Earth itself.

It was austere and magnificent, those trainmen making their solitary trek across lonesome territory. I felt like I was riding in a Matchbox car in a model train world. In a few minutes we had passed each other and parted, swallowed up by the prairie. A couple of hours later we pulled into Calgary.

We arrived on the last day of the Stampede, a huge annual rodeo and western festival. We missed most of it, but we got there in time for fireworks. We camped on a mountainside, explored the city, then turned south to the U. S. We left Calgary with 4,439 miles on the meter, halfway through our eventual 35 days on the road. We had stayed with relatives for one night and camped the other 16.

Some adventures: sun turned to storm while we were canoeing on Glacier National Park’s Lake McDonald. It took all our strength to paddle against a punishing wind. We truly thought we might not make it back to shore. We did, of course, just as the canoe rental guy was picking up the phone to call rangers to the rescue.

On a promontory in Utah we met a grey-haired couple on a Honda Gold Wing motorcycle. “I just retired a couple of months ago,” the man said, “and we’re taking a trip we’ve thought about for years. We’re headed up toward Canada, then we’re not sure where we’ll go next.” I thought then, “A couple of crazy old folks out for a last hurrah.” Well, I’m sure I’m older now than they were then. Now I think, “A couple of folks starting out on the rest of their lives, with plenty of time to go.” And I think about Aunt Margaret and Uncle Joe, who thought they might take such a trip, but never did.

Bob’s Motel in Salt Lake City was almost an adventure. We couldn’t find the forest campground marked on the map and spent too long looking for it. The only other one was a KOA near the city center. By the time we got there it was full. We went looking for a cheap motel. We found Bob’s.

As I approached the beat-up aluminum screen door that passed for an entry way, a huge German Shepherd got up from the dirty carpet and growled. Two guys inside looked at me like, “What the hell do you want?” He said, through the screen, “We’re full.” I think Bob had regular customers and we were not them. We went back to the KOA, they had mercy on us, we set up on the asphalt by their flagpole. My back still hurts.

We stayed with family in Las Vegas, took a tour of the strip, toured Hoover Dam. We went to Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert — had to turn the heater on full blast to keep the car from overheating — and stayed with an aunt in Torrance, California. We went down to Venice Beach, drove down the Pacific Coast. We visited an actress cousin in Los Angeles who also managed the Odyssey Theatre there. We saw a play, met some people in the cast, had great conversations.

We doubled back to Phoenix, found it too hot, stayed in a cheap motel for the air conditioning, which it turned out was a swamp cooler and didn’t work. We went straight north to the Grand Canyon. On the way we camped at the Walnut Canyon National Monument, toured the cliff dwellings, went to Horseshoe Bend, floated on Lake Powell.

As we drifted on a raft on Lake Powell, we realized we were pretty much out of time, pretty much out of money, my start date was looming, and Lynn had to get a job. We had to go back to the world. Time to go home.

We went to Santa Fe as a buffer. We took our time, toured the city, talked to shop keepers, enjoyed a brunch and a supper, camped in the desert. It would be our last night to camp under that great Western night sky, thousands of stars in black velvet, cozy in our sleeping bags against the chill wind that comes when the sun goes down.

The next three days we hightailed it home on the interstates through Amarillo, Oklahoma City, and Little Rock. We got to Little Rock, one day from home, about sunset in a driving rain. Time for a motel. We pulled into Penny’s Motel, drenched and bereft. They were full. I asked the desk clerk if she knew of a campground nearby. Taking pity, she said they were renovating a room at the end of the place, the carpets were torn up but the beds were still there. Did we want that? She gave us fresh linens and charged us $5.00. That was our last night on the road.

A week later I was back at school, Lynn found a new and much better job, and I patched things up with my father-in-law to be.

I’m still using the same Army surplus sleeping bag I got for the trip, and the same Coleman lantern. The tent was done for and is long gone. The stove gave up the ghost a few years later. I traded the Toyota for a pickup which got plenty of use, but it never saw the action of that good old station wagon.

Writer and traveler Paul Theroux wrote that “As for the recognition of hard travel, the feeling is mainly retrospective, since it is only in looking back that we see how we have been enriched.” Our trip may not have been “hard travel,” but we were certainly enriched. The trip also gave us the confidence to take chances, confront problems, make the most of small things, know that things will work out if you just keep at it. We have taken lots of trips since then. We have planned a few of them.

Footnote: A year later we got married and took a honeymoon trip to Maine. This time we stayed in hotels!