Montreal to Texas

Driving from Montreal to Lindale, Texas in the dead of winter with minus -12C outside and snow storms all along the east coast is generally discouraged. Did we have winter tires, or all season tires? . . . it was too cold to try and find that little inscription so I waved it off knowing it shouldn’t cause any problems. We drove through the night from Peterborough through Toronto, slaloming the ExpressWay and the Service road. Nine lanes in one direction seemed to be too much even for the GPS.  In Canada all the way to Windsor and then came to the border in Detroit.

            We crossed at 01:00am, greeted by American border police hospitality. Mr. Harveys, and Mr. Wendys each had their turn with their interrogations. Forced to wake the children and get out of the car, we then filled out forms for an hour. Mr. TacoBell and Mr. DominosPizza managed to have us surrender our fingerprints to their databases. Meanwhile a bored Mr. KentuckyFriedChicken infringed our trunk and all our luggage. 

          We continued our journey soon finding ourselves on two lane highways in the dead of night with 18/22/26 and 30 Wheeler trucks weaving in and out among themselves. I felt like a lanky wimp being bullied by the bigboys. This was their terrain and all we could do was attentively anticipate their thoughts and steer clear as they gave one blinker and swerved into the fast lane.  It was a sobering scene as I watched the oncoming highway closed from an accident, A Ford F-150 pulling a mammoth sized mobile home managed to flip the mobile home but stay on its own wheels.  Why was there also an 18 wheeler truck stopped 50 meters down the road?

          After 14hours of driving we arrived in Nashville where a light dusting of snow greeted us as we pulled up to the Marriot and treated ourselves to their Kings Suite to recharge our batteries. 

We also discovered the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain, an all you can eat Chinese buffet and 1 week of diarrhea for the family. What in the world do they put in the food here!

          One more days travels and as we pulled into what has become our home for the next three months. I checked the gauges: 2900km’s and 29 hours of driving. To my relief the children were less traumatized by the drive then us. We found the Youth With A Mission (YWAM) campus and located our cabin in the woods, welcomed us with a “Follow your dreams” sign on the doorway.

Finally we had arrived.