Our cross-Canada road trip kicked off in Southwestern Ontario, where we had been living for the past four years.
Early one fall morning, we handed over the keys to our apartment, hopped into our filled-to-the-brim vehicle, and started driving. The skies were blue, the sun was shining and temperatures were climbing up past 20ºC.
Fast-forward about four hours into the drive on that first day- we'd listened to the one "road-trip" CD we managed to make before leaving over a dozen times, the blue skies had turned grey, and drops of rain started to appear on the windshield. Soon those few rain drops turned into a torrential downpour.
Of course driving in the rain is much less fun than driving in the sun, but our spirits were high and we were making good time so we kept going. Then out of nowhere, a cop car flew past us going twice our speed. A few more kilometers down the road and cars were at a standstill as far as we could see. We turned off the car and attempted to wait out the traffic for two hours before a cop pulled up beside our car to tell us there had been a bad accident on the two-lane highway and the road would be closed for at least eight hours more.
We had a choice- we could either turn around and drive back the way we came or take a four-hour detour to another road that would take us North. Even though we knew we wouldn't make it to our planned stop that night, we decided to go with the flow (and many of the other cars that had been waiting) and opt for the detour. This minor bump in the road actually worked out in our favour- we were able to see some great landscapes during the day that we would have passed by in the dark the night before.
Over the next couple of days, we followed the winding lakeside roads lined with trees in all their fall glory through Northern Ontario (an absolutely beautiful drive, if you ever get the chance). Along the way, we made sure to stop at the Big Nickel in Sudbury, the big goose in Wawa, and the Terry Fox memorial in Thunder Bay.
On our final day in Ontario, temperatures dropped below zero and it started to snow. We decided to drive our summer tires out of there as quickly as possible and head on to the next province: Manitoba.
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