Roadtrip to Montreal
It seems like the only driving I do these days is long distance. Joanne and I recently drove her and her stuff up to Montreal so that she could start at McGill. On Saturday, we loaded the truck, drove to Montreal, and unloaded most of the truck. On Sunday I drove to Burlington, VT, and flew back to NYC. I returned the truck having driven 472.6 miles on 48 gallons of gas.
We started at 7am on Saturday, walking to the Penske store. It’s a good thing we got there early because their computers were down (on the busiest moving day of the year) and they were doing everything by hand. We did manage to get the truck she’d reserved and the special insurance needed to drive it into Canada. We drove it back to the apartment and waited for the super. Presumably everyone says they’ll be ready at 9am and never is, but we were, so we waited until he showed up at 9:30. The elevator is small and the super had the hand truck, so I felt a bit useless for the first few elevator loads. But eventually I found enough stuff to move to regain my usefulness. Many elevator trips later (11am) we had the truck loaded and headed up to Columbia to pick up my laptop. We needed to get my laptop because I was lending it to Joanne while hers was in the shop. The hard drive in her MacBook had shattered, according to the tech at TechServe, and it wouldn’t be replaced until after our trip.
We left Columbia at noon, crossed the George Washington Bridge, and I immediately made a wrong turn. After much panicking about the traffic on I-95 north, we took a detour through beautiful Teaneck, NJ to get to route 4, which we took to route 17, which we took to I-287, which we took to I-87. There were no more turns until Canada. The weather was nice, and we cruised along admiring Adirondack state park, in which I saw two female pheasants by the roadside, mostly listening to Feist’s new album.
We arrived at the border around 7pm, that was where things started to get hairy. Cars were lined up about 20 deep at the border, but our line was hardly moving at all. We think that we may have had a trainee border guard, because our lane had two flashing yellow lights while other lanes only had one. We watched as a graying motorcycle gang in the next lane passed us and crossed the border before we’d made it halfway. After waiting in line for an hour and a half, we finally made it to the guard, who told us we needed to park the truck and go into customs to declare things.
Inside, Joanne presented her meticulous inventory of every box and bag only to be asked to enumerate the value of each one and the serial number of each piece of electronic equipment. We were incredulous, but the officer insisted, although when we asked for a flashlight to search for serial numbers he relented a bit. Then we took him out to the truck to show him the contents and he relented a bit more when he saw that the two page inventory only filled half the truck. A quick and dirty price estimate got us the secret password to escape into Canada. We passed under the official border gate at 9pm.
After driving through miles of over-lit cattle-chute border road, full of traffic cameras and impending lock down, we came to a normal highway from which we could see the stars. They have nice stars in Quebec. We arrived at the apartment at 10pm, less than eager to start moving. The furniture and light things were done by midnight, and we decided to get some dinner and leave the rest of the stuff for the morning. Somewhere in that moving, my “oh crap, this job isn’t going to do itself, I’d better get it done” instinct kicked in, perhaps inculcated by countless wrestling practices in high school. It’s amazing how big a pile of stuff that will move.
The locals were a colorful bunch. The first people we met were some of Joanne’s neighbors, who helped her into the building to get her keys. Subsequent passersby were significantly more drunk and the alley where we’d parked the truck turned out to be a good place to relieve oneself. Luckily no one confused the furniture waiting outside the truck for a pissoir. Finally, a drunken neighbor standing on a balcony over the truck started haranguing me in French. It took me a few minutes to realize he was addressing me, as it’s quite easy to ignore someone speaking a language you don’t understand. I reassured him that I was moving the truck in 5 minutes and everything seemed to be smoothed over.
In the morning we finished moving everything in from the truck and had time to get something to eat and to hang out. Saying goodbye was sad and it was compounded by the stressful anticipation of driving the truck to Burlington, VT in time to catch my flight back to New York at 7:30pm. I left at 3 and immediately hit traffic getting out of the city. It wasn’t bad, though, and from there it was pretty smooth sailing to the border. The best part was a little road that was almost a highway, route 133, which was full of afternoon sun, motorcyclists, and farm stands advertising “maïs sucre.” It only took 25 minutes to cross the border into Vermont and the border guard was only slightly suspicious of a twenty-something guy driving an empty truck. He hopped into the back and tapped around looking for secret compartments. Driving in Vermont was also nice, I saw lake Champlain and a wild turkey on the side of the road.
I got to Williston, VT by 5, filled up the tank with $75 of gas, and dropped the truck off at the closed rental office. A taxi I had called from Montreal picked me up and drove me the mile to the airport. The woman at the taxi place had answered the phone, “Taxi. Hold on a sec, I need to give the baby to my husband and get a pen…” The taxi that showed up was early and from a different company, so I presumed that my reservation had been overheard on the radio and poached. When I called the original company, however, it turned out to be legit. I guess I revealed my city slicker’s suspicion to the nice people of Vermont.
It was a relief to be done with the whole move, which was stressful for all, but then the sadness kicked in.