Getting Lost While on the Road - An Opportunity to See New Places or Just a Hassle?

I will never understand why some people make such a big fuss when they get lost on the road. I mean, I understand getting lost on your way to work or to an important appointment isn't an option but when you're on a road trip and you have a window of time available to do as you please and the open road in front of you, why wouldn't you want to go off course and see things you otherwise would never get to see? Some of my best travel memories started with a wrong turn, misguided directions, a malfunctioning GPS, a map read upside down in the dark or my innate sense of curiosity getting the better of me so my car instinctively veers off into unknown territory waiting to be explored.

I rarely read maps. They're too much of a hassle, they take up space in my car, its too much work to fold and unfold them and most times, it is either too dark to read a map or I don't feel like pulling over to read the small print of a map that is probably not even updated anyway. I do have a GPS. It's a nifty little tool for when I have to find a specific place in a hurry. I have tried to use it on road trips to disastrous proportions that had me more lost than I was before I turned it on.

If I have time to kill, sometimes I "forget" my GPS at home and set out in search of a specific destination and get lost in the process. This is all part of the adventure, right? Like the time I wanted to find Cape Clear in the Cape Breton Highlands. The road system up there is confusing at best, with wood roads going off into every direction with more roads going off those roads that turn into ATV trails or foot paths. There are no signs and everything looks the same; trees, trees and more trees...until I finally found Cape Clear and one of the most spectacular views I have ever seen!



I like to drink coffee but, for some strange reason, I can only enjoy it if I'm in a moving vehicle. So in order to avoid that withdrawal headache that comes in the mid-afternoon if I don't get my fix, I have to jump in the car, fill up a thermos of some home-brewed coffee or hit up a local coffee shop. I can't bring the coffee home to drink and I can't just sit in the coffee shop or park the car and drink it; it just doesn't taste the same unless the car is moving and I am going somewhere. Sometimes I drive around town a few times or to a nearby town and just go home once my cup is empty. More times than not, I pick a street I have never been on before and drive until I can't drive anymore. I wouldn't know about some of the beautiful beaches, parks, rest areas and scenic places to watch a sunset or moonrise if it had not been for this innate curiosity I have to explore the unknown.

My map and GPS-free travels have taken me to many memorable places I would never have known existed if I had followed strict paths to my intended destinations. I'd heard there was a monastery in Cape Breton but no one ever seemed to know where it was whenever I asked. I was driving through Pleasant Bay along the Cabot Trail one summer afternoon when I decided to turn onto a road I'd never been down before. When the pavement ended, I thought about turning around but, as it always does, curiosity got the better of me and I kept driving along that road that wrapped around the rocky coast of Northern Cape Breton until...I happened upon the monastery I had heard about. Gambo Abbey, tucked away in a remote corner of the island I thought I knew like the back of my hand!

I was both excited and nervous at the prospect of driving in a large city in the United States for the first time. I picked up my rental car at McCarron International Airport in Las Vegas early on a Thursday morning with intentions of driving around aimlessly in the desert for three days, happening upon whatever came my way. A GPS did come with the car and I thought it might be a good idea to use it to at least get myself out of the city limits but I first had to return to The Luxur Hotel where I was staying to pick up my supplies for the weekend. The GPS already had an entry for "LAX" which was the name of the hotel bar at The Luxor. With the GPS set for "LAX", I set out into the morning rush hour traffic. It was only after my GPS took me onto a 16-lane highway heading west that I remembered the Los Angeles International Airport also went by the name LAX. After dodging lightning speed traffic and frightening lane changes that almost had me killed on the I-95, I did make it, in one piece back to my hotel and, again, set my GPS to take me outside the city limits. The nifty little gadget did its thing and soon I was cruising through The Mojave with nothing but wide open spaces for miles around me. Since I didn't want to get too lost out there in that unforgiving and sometimes dangerous landscape, I availed of the setting that would only take me on paved main roads. This is where the nifty little gadget epically failed. And where do you think I ended up with nightfall only a mere few hours away? After letting the GPS guide me down a few dozen paved roads that seemed like they would lead somewhere, the pavement ended and turned into a gravel road in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Now, if you have ever been out in that desert at sunset, you know the feeling that comes over you when you realize that soon, that sun will go down and darkness will come and you may not see another car for hours or days and there isn't a single house or streetlight anywhere for miles in some places. This was one of those places. And there are snakes, poisonous ones...and scorpions, serial killers and the odd UFO abduction. So what did I do? I took that GPS and tossed in the backseat and enjoyed the moment I found myself in. I will never forget that experience for as long as I live. There is not a sound out there in that vast, open space, barely a breath of wind and when the sun sets, its like the whole desert is on fire. At the time, I knew it would be a moment in my life that I would talk about and remember for many years to come!

I did find my way out of that maze of gravel roads and over the next few days, I found more off-the-beaten-track places that I would have missed if I'd used the GPS to take me straight to my final destination of Death Valley National Park. The Valley of Fire, Area 51, The Extraterrestrial Highway (where much of the UFO activity over the United States is reported) and a stretch of deserted two-lane highway surrounded by beautiful mountain ranges that led to the California state line.

When I approached Las Vegas a couple of days later on Saturday night, I reached for the GPS and set it to take me on a route that would have me skip driving down The Strip and take me straight to my hotel...and that nifty little gadget failed miserably once again. I followed the directions and ended up guess where? At the opposite end of The Strip on a Saturday night. I don't think I need to explain to you what Las Vegas Boulevard, AKA The Strip, the biggest party street in the world is like on a hot, Saturday night...I'm sure you get the idea. My hotel was at the complete other end and once I was locked into that chaotic gridlock, I had no choice but to continue down that entire strip of flashing neon lights, drunken pedestrians coming out of everywhere, climbing on roofs of cars, taxi drivers trying to push their way to their next paying customer while trying to figure out what lane I should be in to avoid making yet another wrong turn into the unknown. But you know what, when it was all said and done and I made it back to my hotel, kissed the ground and thanked my lucky stars that my unwanted detour down the Vegas Strip on a Saturday night didn't result in me or anyone else getting killed, I gave myself a little pat on the back; now I can say I drove down one of the most famous streets in the world. I wasn't a passenger in a stretch limo or taxi cab. I drove it myself and it was very interesting to say the least.

Over the years, I've had many mapless/GPSless adventures that took me to some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. While driving through the Rocky Mountains of Banff National Park, I turned onto an interesting-looking road just outside of Canmore and discovered the beauty that is Kananaskis Country.

A trip to The Magdelan Islands in Quebec saw me venturing onto a country road lined with sand dunes that, upon walking over, revealed a beautiful stretch of sandy beach that went for miles.

In the days pre-911, when crossing into the United States from Canada didn't even require a passport, a last-minute decision to take the "scenic" route home from Montreal led me on a misguided but eventful journey through Upstate New York and Vermont at a time of year when the fall foliage was at its most colorful. A random drive up a gravel road in Framboise, Cape Breton led me to a abandoned Victorian-era house with the front door wide open. Looters had already ransacked the place years before but there were still some interesting things laying around like some newspapers from the 1930's and furniture and clothing that had been left there by the previous owners who, it seems, must have left in a hurry. On a trip to the Southern Shore of Nova Scotia, I made a wrong turn while trying to find the town of Lunenburg and accidentally ended up at Oak Island, also known as The Money Pit, the island made famous by repeated attempts to extract pirate treasure that is said to have been buried there by Captain Kidd.

Not all of my wrong turns were made in a car. One of the most beautiful beaches I had ever laid eyes on was found quite by accident after I jumped onto a public bus in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico and went in search of some Mayan Ruins to explore. I exited the bus just outside Tulum, found some ruins, explored them and than did what I usually do when I find myself in a new place. I found a road that looked interesting and walked down it until it came to an end...and revealed the beautiful Playa Santa Fe. Completely surrounded by giant sand dunes, completely covered in soft, white sand and completely deserted. Another slice of paradise found...quite by accident!

Road Tripping Into Unknown Territory - Visiting a new City, Meeting my Great Aunt for the First Time and Dodging the Occasional Highway Stalker

There are many things that signify summer to me. Longer days, sunshine, camping and long hot days at the beach. But I know the season is truly here the first time I pack up my car and head out onto the open road…Yes, I am talking about the good ol’ fashion Canadian road trip!

This year, I had the opportunity to mark the start of summer with a different kind of road trip, one that saw me travel to a city I had never been before to meet a person I had never met before.

As many of you probably already know, my beloved mother, Maria, passed away on April 22nd. My sisters and I were faced with the heartbreaking task of clearing out her apartment. During that very difficult weekend, we came across a number of items that evoked a variety of emotions including sadness, happiness and surprise. One of the surprising things we found was a letter addressed to my mother from a woman in Dieppe, New Brunswick. My mom had often spoken of her long-lost aunt whom she recently reconnected with but I didn’t realize that they had become so close. You see, my grandfather (mom’s father) died when she was only two years old so neither she nor my sisters and I ever got to know that side of the family.

My biological grandfather passed away in 1954. He was only 28 when he died tragically and unexpectedly and left behind a young wife (my grandmother) and a two year old daughter (my mom). My grandmother moved back to her hometown of Cheticamp in Cape Breton and a number of years later, she remarried and settled in New Waterford. Mom kept in touch with some members of her father’s side of the family but as the years passed, she lost touch with many of them.

After I found that letter from my great-aunt, I made it my mission to contact her and tell her the sad news of mom’s passing. It was very hard to contact someone I never met before and inform her of such sad news but after making that call and allowing her to get over the initial shock that her niece had passed away, I had a very heartwarming conversation with her and felt an immediate connection. Not long after that phone call, I received a hand-written letter in the mail from my great-aunt Mercedes. Her writing was so light and witty and was that of someone who embraced life and took things as they came. I immediately took a liking to her; she seemed so much like myself in many ways. I desperately wanted to learn more about this woman and not long after receiving that letter, I wrote one to her and in it I asked her if it would be ok if I paid her a visit in the near future….A last minute decision that took me on an adventure of a different kind.

I left for Dieppe early on June 22nd in my new car I had purchased only the week before. This was to be the ultimate test. I was just getting used to the low profile tires that were on it when I purchased it from the dealer and it was a bigger car than I was used to so this trip would really determine if the car lived up to my requirements; good gas mileage, fast and smooth on the highway, good handling on windy roads and reliable on long trips. I was well-rested and fully awake when I left home and everything was going well until I got a few kilometers past the Canso Causeway. Somewhere along that stretch, the monotony of the straight Trans-Canada highway hypnotized me and I nodded off. To this day, I still have no idea how long my head was rested snuggly on my right shoulder as I cruised along. I was shaken out of my unconsciousness when the car veered onto the rumble strips and after a near heart-attack, I pulled over at the next rest stop, kissed the ground, splashed my face with ice-cold water and grabbed a large coffee before continuing on my way with the windows down and the music as loud as it would go so I would have trouble nodding off again. This just goes to prove that you do not need to be tired to be hypnotized by the road. This happened to me while I was well-rested and during daylight hours. It was a real wake-up call to the dangers that we can face when driving on the highway.

I don’t usually travel with maps or a GPS system. One of my favorite things about road trips is getting lost and finding those new, unexpected places off the beaten track that can only be found when one turns off an unfamiliar ramp and makes a wrong turn into the unknown. For this trip, I did make a point to borrow a GPS just so I could find my aunt’s place easily but I didn’t have it turned on when I turned off on one of those unknown ramps and, you guessed it, made a wrong turn looking for a Tim Horton’s coffee shop where I could log onto my laptop and check my email. I was only lost for about a half hour when I finally found a place to stop. Even though this Tim Horton’s had the sign “free wifi at this location” posted in the window, it wasn’t until after I spent some money to be able to sit down in the air conditioned shop that I discovered their wifi was not working. There was also nowhere to charge my dying phone and I hate not having a working phone when I am traveling alone on the highway.

After I returned to my car and started to head back out onto the highway, I noticed a car parked next to me with a young man behind the wheel. Normally, this would not peak my interest but I got that spine tingling feeling that something was not right. This feeling, which I believe to be my intuition, has never been wrong; my guard was up and I took note of the description of the car, the man driving and the license plate just to be safe. The car would not be hard to spot if I were to cross paths with it again; it was seriously rusted, the passenger door was dented and there was no handle on the passenger door. It would have been hard for me to forget the man’s face too; his stare as I got into my vehicle and following gaze as I pulled out of the parking lot was just plain creepy. Sure enough, near the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick Border, I spotted that car in my rear-view mirror, keeping a safe distance behind me, presumably thinking I would not notice. I immediately swung into action. The first thing that popped in my mind was to get somewhere where there were people and assess the situation from a public place. I turned off on the next exit and lo and behold, he kept going just as I suspected he would. You almost need to get into the minds of these people to predict what they are going to do next and I knew exactly what he was going to do; park somewhere out of sight further up the highway and wait for me to come back and continue on my journey. A smart stalker learns as much about his victim as he can and, just from watching me at that last stop he learned that I was a young woman traveling alone. How did he know this? Easy. I stopped to use the internet at a desolate donut stop in the middle of nowhere, my car was packed full of stuff and I had made a phone call from the parking lot (in which I spoke with a family member about how my trip was going) before I noticed him watching me. My next move was to sit and wait. Fortunately there was another donut shop with working internet at this stop and I made myself comfortable in front of the window so I could see the road and his car if it happened by. And happen by it did…about 40 minutes after I arrived. He slowly made his way by the donut shop, perhaps seeing my car, perhaps tired of the pursuit, and continued on down the road. When I saw his car disappear over the horizon, I packed up and headed out in the opposite direction hoping to never cross paths with him again and I didn’t. I’m sure every woman who has ever traveled alone over long distances on the highway has experienced this; I know this was not the first time I acquired a highway stalker as I’ve come to call them. I’m sure they are usually harmless and bored but I still keep my guard up whenever I notice something is not right.

It was early evening by the time I crossed the border into New Brunswick and almost dark when I pulled up to my great-aunt’s apartment building. I found the place with no problems thanks to my GPS which led me right to her door. I called her on my cell and within seconds, she bolted out the backdoor and into the parking lot and embraced me. This was the first time I had met this woman, so I had no idea what to expect but she immediately made me feel welcome and it wasn’t long before I began feeling like I had known her all my life. Meeting my great-aunt for the first time was almost like an adopted child meeting their birth parents for the first time – we didn’t know one another but were connected by blood. Because of this, there was bound to be some traits and common interests that we couldn’t help inheriting. I soon learned that we both hate watching television and wasting time with idleness and chit chat about the weather and we both love the outdoors and eating healthy and living a healthy lifestyle. I just hope that when I am 84, I have as much energy and zest for life as she has!

My first full day in Dieppe was an interesting one. An early morning walk around the neighborhood to get familiarized with the area, a trip to the mall for some lunch and a drive around the city looking at all the new urban sprawl being built up took up a large portion of the day. The city is fairly small but growing fast with many newcomers coming from bigger urban centers to find their little piece of suburbia with a guaranteed larger plot of land than what was available in nearby Moncton.

While going through my mom’s things, I also came across some photo albums with old black and white photos of my mom as a child and various relatives who are long gone and photos of my sisters and I growing up and I proudly showed them to her. My great-aunt also had some photo albums that she wanted to show me and in them were photos of her brother, my grandfather whom I had never met. Growing up, I had always been interested in learning more about that side of the family that I knew little about. My grandmother rarely spoke of her first husband and my mother didn’t really know much about her father. I learned a lot about him and the rest of my great-uncles and aunts and an entire family that I knew existed but never knew anything about. I also learned that Mercedes loved to write (another trait we shared) and she wrote a book entitled The Journey about her family. She read me some excerpts from the book and although many tragedies befell the family throughout the decades, they remained happy, close and strong in the face of anything that came their way.

When my time with my great-aunt came to an end a couple of days later, we were both sad to be once again going our separate ways. I vowed to return to Dieppe again soon and visit her and I hope that will be sooner than later. If all goes well, I shall return to Dieppe this fall and pay her another visit.

As I was leaving the Dieppe area, before I even made it to the Trans-Canada Highway, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take the long, scenic route home…through Prince Edward Island. I had always wanted to drive over the Confederation Bridge, the bridge that opened in 1997 and connects PEI with Mainland Canada. I saw this as a chance to finally see it and experience it while also taking a different way home with different scenery than what I had already seen on the way up. I didn’t bother to set my GPS because I was certain the bridge was west of my current location and there would be plenty of signs to guide me right to it along the way. Once again, I was wrong and found myself headed in the wrong direction. It wasn’t until I started seeing signs that indicated Fredericton was coming up soon that I realized I was going the wrong way. Fredericton is more than an hour away from Dieppe and nowhere near the Confederation Bridge. A gas station attendant confirmed it for me; I had been going the wrong way for about 100 kilometers!

I backtracked and soon enough, I was on the branch of the TCH that led right to the bridge. I was making good enough time on that straight highway with hardly any other traffic around, cruising along at 120 kmph when I spotted a tractor on the side of the road ahead. I slowed down enough to allow the woman driving to realize I was coming up behind her when suddenly, she veered the tractor out onto the highway and crossed into a driveway on the other side. With brakes screeching and horn blaring, I was able to bring my car to a halt only feet away from her. Even my screams for her to watch where she was going fell on deaf ears; to this day, I am certain she did not see nor hear me nor notice the commotion she had caused or how close we both came to becoming road kill.

Not long after the tractor incident, The Confederation Bridge finally came into view. After stopping to take a few photos and getting a good look at that architectural marvel, I made the crossing. There really wasn’t much to it and I couldn’t really see over the walls but at least I can now say I saw it. PEI is very different from the other Atlantic Provinces but it is particularly a different place for drivers. First of all, it’s a slower pace along windswept fields and rocky coastline. The speed limit is no more than 90 kmph everywhere on the island. Secondly, gas is always more expensive in PEI than anywhere else and I was glad I had filled up in New Brunswick where it was the cheapest. It was hard for me to drive at such a slow pace when I was used to the 110 kmph on the mainland and I had to make it to the docks at Wood Islands to board the last ferry of the day but I did managed to race across the island without being pulled over by the Mounties. Along the way, I noticed how meticulous Prince Edward Islanders are with their lawns and homes; some of the most beautiful properties I have ever seen are in PEI complete with lush green grass, brightly painted, large, Victoria style homes and farmhouses. Those islanders really take pride in their homes, their land and their province.

I just made the ferry in time for loading and just in time to find a nice spot on the outside deck to watch a beautiful sunset. It was dark by the time I reached the other side, I was tired and there are moose, deer and other critters who wander onto the highway at night in that area. But I had an easy fix for this; drink lots of coffee, blare the music and open the sunroof and all the windows! There wasn’t going to be a repeat of my highway snooze only a few days before. I love the highway especially on nights like that. The wind blowing through my hair, my favorite tunes setting the backdrop for yet another road trip memory, a clear sky full of stars, a full moon shining brightly through my sunroof and guiding me along the deserted highway, over the Canso Causeway and back on the 105, the highway I know like the back of my hand!