Our 6-Day Drive to Canada
A few months ago Ryan and I were at a ChooseFI meetup near Charlotte. Someone had just presented their case study, and we were all standing around chatting about upcoming plans afterwards.
Our new friends Chad and Tracey came up to ask us a few questions about our upcoming travels, as they were planning on doing something similar very soon. Chad was asking me about several specific details and I distinctly remember him commenting on a blog post I had just published. In it I had mentioned that we’d created a rule for ourselves:
No drives longer than six hours per day if there are multiple consecutive driving days on the schedule.
I imagine I remember this conversation because I felt really proud of that rule. We don’t need to rush! We’ll be retired! We can take all the time in the world!
What I realize now is that I should’ve taken that rule just one step farther- because when you are planning to drive for SIX DAYS STRAIGHT you might want to consider not just the number of hours per day but also perhaps the number of days in a row you’ll be eating PB & J and carrot sticks out of a cooler, mmkay?
Y’all, listen- we drove our butts off. (Literally- Ryan was commenting about how his had gone numb toward the end.)
And now that it’s over, I’m pretty glad we pushed through. Sure, there were places along the way that looked really cool to stop and see- Harper’s Ferry, the biggest ax in the world somewhere in New Brunswick, and maybe that’s it because that’s all that’s coming to me at the moment. But that’s not the point. The point is, we now have a new, additional rule:
No more than three driving days in a row.
Sure, we missed seeing the biggest ax in the world and obviously that is a loss. However, we must carry on.
Please enjoy the state and province sign photos I took whilst speeding by them. *Note that the blurry rainy one is Maryland, but you’ll just have to trust me on that because I took it in the middle of rain-maggedon 5000.
We are now in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia! I can’t even believe it, honestly. I’ve been thinking about it and researching it for so long.
I’ll write more about it in the next installment, but for now I’ll leave you with this teaser from our three-mile taster hike this morning in Cape Breton Highlands National Park:
Taken from Le Chemin du Buttereau trail, the former home of 5 families about 100 years ago. The remains of their homes (complete with info about how many kids they had- over 50 among them) dot the trail.
Question for today: Had you ever heard of Cape Breton before now? Apparently it won the Conde Nast most beautiful island in North America at some point. More photos to come!