Prep That Ride!
Always have a snow brush to clean your entire vehicle off. Snow blowing off of your vehicle will make it invisible to other motorists.
Driving
Seasonal Change
We are in a state of seasonal change. Not only is the weather changing, but the roads are changing as well.
Ice road woes (and whoas)
I was driving back to Red Deer from Calgary the other day and got a speeding ticket in a blinding snowstorm. The cop told me there is a law in Alberta that states that speed limits are reduced to 80 km/h when winds exceed 70 km/h. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that I’d …
Vanishing point in an invisible car
I have a clean driver’s slate. I mention this because it shows that most people, no matter how many goofy things they do when they were young, will finally straighten themselves out. I really try to never speed anymore and I am usually in somebody’s way on the road. What a difference from the 1970s! …
Let’s get some mud on them trucks!
The annual mud bog competition is back on July 21 on Robert Service Way
Vulnerability and shared space
Anyone who has attended a Kim Beggs concert, or listened to one of her CDs, knows that the subject of death often shows up in her lyrics. It certainly did on October 12, during the sixth of 41 stops on her current two-month marathon tour. Earlier that day, the Whitehorse singer-songwriter and her tour partner, …
Family Vacation
As children are once again back in school — practicing their writing skills by reporting on the topic “What I did last summer,” — it is a good time to reflect on how effective the opportunities for family-related memory-making were over the past couple of months. This is also a good time to think about …
States of Inebriation
We gratefully dropped our packs in the well-appointed bedroom of the houseboat. After one hour and five boats we had settled on the first we had been shown, and, not having found anyone with whom to share, were looking at two nights of what seemed like ridiculous indulgence: an entire houseboat complete with air-conditioned bedroom, …
Explaining Travel Realities to People Outside
In just a few days we’ll be loading our little Toyota Yaris onto a freight truck and shipping it to Whitehorse to have a new driver’s side front door installed. It’s not that the car can’t be driven to the city in the summer. I made two trips with it during the last half of …
Zen and the Art of Parallel Parking
When I was learning to drive, one required skill haunted my dreams. Leading up to my driver’s test in the summer of 1998 I would go down to the Qwanlin “Mall” parking lot, after hours, and set up pylons. Then I’d practice parallel parking in my family’s 1987 Tercel 4wd wagon. It was boring and …
Driving
The peninsular city of Halifax isn’t a safe place to bicycle commute, but that sure makes it fun. The streets in the hilled port city are from a single-lane, dirt, horse-pulled-cart era. They graduated from dirt to cobblestone to pavement in most areas, but they didn’t end up widening the streets in a lot of …
Government-imposed one-on-one time
Did you know that new drivers in the Yukon need 50 hours of instruction before they can take their road test? I didn’t know that. All I needed to get my driver’s license, back in the day, was a Learner’s Permit, a working vehicle and high hopes. Today, not only do they need 50 hours …