That’s the last Inukshuk, Highway 17 has been lined with them the past two days.  These human forms, some classic in design and others more avant-garde, have been my constant companions as I cross Ontario.  Whenever I’ve been feeling a bit low I glance up the highway’s stony embankments, and there is an Inukshuk.  My…

Sometimes a ride is just a ride, there’s no deeper meaning or context to be provided.  These are the rides magazines never show you, the hard slogs.  Magazines are all about peak experiences, not the troughs.  Leaving Sault Ste. Marie, Highway 17 hasn’t been what I expected.  I was told to brace for mind numbing…

Mattawa, Ontario – At the Valois Restaurant and Motel, in Mattawa Ontario, churchgoers have flowed in, nearly filling the restaurant. Worship done they sit at tables craving cold meats on over-processed bread, served with a side of fries and consumed with a dash of Sunday morning righteousness. They are looking askance at the stranger in…

On the back roads of New Brunswick, the fall colours are gathering; greens transforming to oranges, yellows and golds. They would make a tremendous backdrop, except right now they’re making a tremendous blur. The road quality is horrendous; we’re diving between potholes, ruts, wallows and severe frost heaves that compress the rear suspension and the…

Nova Scotia is built for motorcycle touring. I’m sure of it, provided you hit the right speed to skim over the roads of the Sunrise Trail, which run from smooth to brutally potholed. They are gently winding and combined with late fall light and a warm day the ride makes for motorcycling satisfaction.

Under pallid florescent light and surrounded by clinical décor, people pace; sallow, tired, arms folded and tense.  In the corner a man braced against the wall rocks to-and-fro.  Elsewhere, another sits on a metal bench, staring blankly forward at nothingness, his legs in a sewing machine jiggle.  At a table a woman works through a…

Sepia tones of sunset have given way to the purples of dusk, casting the rugged moraine into subtle relief. One hundred and seventy kilometers from St. John’s on the highway one, Newfoundland becomes a heartbreakingly and beautifully desolate terrain of glacial erratics and tolts.

Channel-Port-aux Basques, NL – In the deepening dusk light, women shaped like baking-powder biscuits look on disapprovingly, while children on bicycles wave and give a thumbs up. The Multistrada’s basso exhaust note reverberates through the tight winding streets, which serpent across each other in a tangle never un-knotted by city planners.