Chapter 11 - Mr. Something Something

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After 15 days on the road and over 2,500 km's I finally left Ontario!! What an event! As I was driving out of Ontario and into Manitoba the thought did occur to me that after so long and such a great start to my adventure, it would probably be a long time before I would find myself back in the massive province where I grew up. I took a moment to say 'see you later'.

I had really been looking forward to getting to Winnipeg as I had been in contact with 2 couch surfing girls and their friends that were all planning a big night on the Tuesday that I arrived. I was originally going to be there much sooner, but Thunder Bay and Duluth made for a new plan.

As was customary by now, whenever showing up to a new city, there was one thing I needed to find right away. A free wireless connection. In Sudbury it had been a pay/use network in a laundry mat and that wasn't going to do it. It needed to be free. So in the Soo we found a coffee shop called 'the bean' or 'bean there done that' or some such play on words. First place where the heater in the van started giving me trouble. After that the motel in Wawa had wireless, and led me to freely browse the couchsurfing world. The Thunder Bay hostel had a free network, as I sat beside Lloyd while he was busy writing letters to the municipality about something important and I made plans to meet up with Sarah. Then going downtown TBay trying to find a connection so that I could track down Zack and/or anyone to put me up on their couch by first unsuccessfully cruising the parking lots at Lakehead U to score a strong signal and then moving onto Franks Laundry where a small shack of a building had a huge wireless signal. The trip to Duluth was easy because Katie was driving her car and I was in the back on my laptop scanning networks at each intersection with plenty to choose from. We felt like some kind of secret ops group, or hackers, scanning unsuspecting residential networks for clues to our mission's goal - finding a place to sleep.

So now that I was in Winnipeg with plenty of experience picking up free signals, the easiest and most reliable find was a Starbucks. They were few and far between and I already had phone numbers for some of the Winnipeg girls, so I had made a call to Risa - who was at work and would be until later on in the evening - so I decided to do a big dinner party for her and invite other CS'ers and her friends over to partake. That meant I needed to find a good signal AND a grocery store. It was starting to get dark and Winnipeg looked confusing enough on my trusted CAA maps let alone trying to find my way around without the light of day. Interestingly and conveniently the big grocery store chain west of Ontario is Safeway and they all seem to have great wireless. So I made up a quick list of groceries for a nice pasta dinner with salad - 2 stolen recipes; one from mom and one from candice - whole wheat penne pasta with antipasto and artichoke hearts and a light garden salad with tomatoes, walnuts, goats cheese and raspberry vinnagrette. (I ate WAY better on the road than I do here in Whistler, I work too much)

I got online and tracked down a few of the other couch surfers in town and as it happened, they all knew Risa and Max who I would be staying with. So no worries there, I invited them all over to Risa's (where they were headed already for later on) and as it would turn out Kelci and her roomate had a couch surfer staying with them - a german girl named Julie - who was on her way east and had been travelling for some time from out west.

So I had some time to kill before Risa would get home so I found her place downtown and grabbed my camera and headed over to the red river and the city hall buildings to check out all the Rene Levesque statues. Or some french guy like that.

UPDATE - I just realized today, December 31st 2011, that I had this unpublished draft of my blog from 2008. I am now going to publish what I had drafted with the hopes of someday filling in all the details as they originally happened...

*side note - Risa from Winnipeg would later come to visit Whistler and in the summer of 2009 she and my cousin Jordan got together! Fun ensued, and she now lives in Vancouver. While Jordan and Risa are no longer together, this just is such an amazing look back on the adventure I had and how it still influences so much today!