The 2019 trip begins Saturday, January 19. 2 trucks from Michigan, 1 from Pennsylvania, and 1 from Connecicut. The destination is Montmangny, Quebec. Ten riders, in the Gaspe’ region, for 10 days of riding.
As is the standard operating procedure for the DarkSide Team, we leave in a winter storm warning for southern Ontario and our trail thru Quebec, for BOTH of our days of truck travel. This always turns out well, if you have ever followed our prior years, why change now?
We departed Flint, MI around 9am, and our travels upto, and past, the border in Port Huron/Sarnia was smooth. About 20km past the border, the snow flurries began, and the road crews were out, and passenger vehicles were wadded up all along the route, on both sides of the 401 eastbound. An interesting conversation topic amongst our group is the way the Ontario Providence plows their highways… They get 2-6 plow/salt trucks that run tandem accross all lanes of the highway, and clear the entire stretch in one sweep. This does cause all traffic behing the operation to bunch up and travel in a pack at 25 mph for 10-30 miles stretches at a time. I happen to be a fan of this procedure… then all lanes are open, not just one cleared lane, and traffic is back up to highway speeds. I’m a fan.
Kingston Ontario and the Courtyard by Marriot is our overnight stay, per protocol. We arrive after about 660 km around 5:30pm. The travel was slow with all the road clearing operations going on, but once we got east of Toronto, traffic diminished, and we started to cut a good clip. We made two stops for fuel, and had lunch in the trucks on the road, chicken shwarama sandwiches, if anybody was curious ( for the last 5-6 years I had been bringing these sandwiches for everybody in our travel group. However, the last 2 years, nobody said anything when I handed each truck driver thier respective cooler containing lunch. So last year, I didn’t pack the lunches for each truck as I thought that maybe the annual lunch at run it’s course. At the end of the first day of last year’s travel I heard from nearly everybody how they missed their annual lunch sandwich and told me i was “really slacking!” Well. I didn’t know they were all a bunch of ungrateful degenerates that had just come to expect their lunches provided! Mental note made). After unpacking our travel overnight bag, we were headed to the Boston’s Pizza accross the parking lot for our evening of adult beverages, catching up, adult beverages, dinner, and adult beverages.
Call time for Sunday morning is 7:30 am for breakfast in the hotel lobby cafe, and on the road by 8:30. The winter storm warning we are under continues until tomorrow night at 11pm. And our travel path is expected to receive the brunt of this storm. And if your familiar with our prior trips, their is defintely some excitement coming our way tomorrow for the reamaining approximate 560km we have yet to travel.
Bye for now,
Stick