Driving Across Canada: How to Sleep in Your Car In the Depths of Winter (Part 3)

Read part one. Then read part two. You’re now reading part three!

We didn’t spend as much time in Manitoba as we could have, although we did take in some classic Winnipeg sights.

Manitoba quickly led to Ontario. And by this time we’d settled into a pleasant road-trip rhythm.

We’d wake up in a parking lot and locate a washroom in which to freshen up.

We purchased groceries along the way, so we always had a varied selection of goodies in ye olde food box.

I’ve never eaten so much fruit and so many baked goods and deli items in my entire life. It was fun to eat prepared foods for the first week, but after that we both started to miss the pleasures of a bowl of cereal or simple home cooked meals, like pasta.

Occasionally, we dined out, but that was a rarity. Here we are at the Trapper’s Lodge restaurant in Parry Sound, Ontario. It was New Year’s Eve!

In general, though, we’d spend a few hours exploring that day’s town, and we’d usually hit the road again by early afternoon.

We’d drive for approximately four hours, and then find our next spot to spend the night.

In terms of showers, we opted for the swimming pool route. We swam every day or two (or sometimes three) in cities all across the country, which was wonderful. We should write a Swimmer’s Guide to Canada. We even swam in a Francophone pool in Quebec!

For the most part, the weather was surprisingly tame when it came to driving conditions. On occasion we’d find ourselves in a slight snow-storm, but we’d usually just stay put wherever we were until the weather cleared. That was the beauty of our trip; we set our own schedule.

Of course, like any road trip, our journey had its share of tribulations.

One tribulation happened early on in our trip. As British Columbians accustomed to above-freezing temperatures, we didn’t give much thought to our windshield-washer fluid.

But as we traveled inland, our windshield-washer fluid–bought on the West coast for their mild, mild winters–began to freeze, and eventually the washer fluid turned into a solid rock.

We had to detach the windshield-washer reservoir and heat it up with our super-duper Webasto heater to melt the fluid, which had frozen to a solid mass.

Another low-point occurred in Dryden, Ontario. Our heater got kind of frozen and refused to work for a night. I believe it was around -16 degrees celcius (not including the wind-chill), and that, my friends, was not a very good night. But we bared the cold and slept in the car anyway.

But we sure did see some sights and learned a lot during our 28-day winter adventure.

Here is Cameron at the beautiful Niagara Falls…but did you know that across the street from these falls are blinking lights, casinos, Ripley’s Believe it or Nots, and lots of strip joints? I know, I was shocked, too. Or maybe you knew that already, but I certainly didn’t! I was expecting to bounce up a rural road to get to the Falls–but instead there’s a mini-Las Vegas that has sprung up around them. (As weird as it sounds, it made me cry, actually. The falls were just such an inspiring sight, and to juxtapose them with so much…flashy glitz….just seemed really, um, wrong.)

Oh…imagine the number of fun things that can be done on a 28-day road trip! I can’t even begin to do them all justice. Just know that we watched coins get made at the Royal Canadian Mint.

And we visited the Parliament buildings…and, oh, so very many other wonderful sights!

And soon enough we were leaving Ontario behind, too. Onwards to Quebec, New Brunswick, and our beloved Prince Edward Island.