Friends, family, and the unavailability of rental cars made for quite the holiday
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Have you ever made plans that suddenly snowballed into something wilder than a mid-March ice storm? Maybe you meant to re-tile the bathroom floor and suddenly found yourself with a sledgehammer in hand, busting down the shower wall because, well, why not?
That’s basically what happened when a weekend trip to Alberta morphed into a 3-week cross-Canada adventure.
It began like this: Two newly-dating adults. So new that they hadn’t yet pipsqueaked gas in front of one another. Lying on a sofa, eau d’infatuation drowning out the smell of supper chicken roasting in the oven.
“I have a friend in Calgary,” said one, staring at the other’s face so intently that she could count his eyelashes. Ninety-six on the top eyelid, in case you’re wondering—a few short of the possible 150. “Wanna go on a trip?”
“Of course,” responded the other, massaging her palms. “My rig pig son lives out there. We could visit both.”
How did it go from a few days in Alberta to 4,000+ kms of close encounters with errant diarrhea, chugging into a mountain service station on gas fumes, a speeding ticket, and backroads not really meant for cars?
Here’s how.
“If we’re going out west,” whispered one, “then I have a friend who lives on the Sunshine Coast. We could rent a car in Alberta and drive all the way out there.”
“Yeah, and my sister and brother are in Vancouver. And I have friends there, too,” responded the other, who’d driven across the country a few times.
Once on her way home from university with a car loaded so full she couldn’t see through the back window—while two free-range cats sometimes blocked views out the front.
“My cousin lives on Vancouver Island, north of Victoria,” said the other, who later admitted he had no clue that getting home from the coast would take more than 24 hours.
So, in 2022, after only a few months of dating, we—I mean, ahem, these two lovebirds—spent three and a half weeks beside each other in very close quarters.
Fast forward a month or so to when plans were progressing from in-the-head to on-the-credit-card. One problem continued to pop up: the lack of available rental vehicles.
How would we get from Calgary to Edmonton to Vancouver Island?
Remember that this was post-Covid. During the pandemic, rental car companies were forced to sell off large amounts of their inventory. Some companies offloaded as much as 40% of their stock. When people could once again escape their houses and, gasp, travel, rental vehicles were rented up faster than face masks had been hurled into bonfires.
Some brilliant roadtrippers got the idea to lease Uhauls in place of SUVs. But we were late on the scene and couldn’t even manage to book a creepy white windowless van.
“Well,” said Mark, thinking cap solidly in place, “We could always buy a car in Calgary and sell it in Vancouver.”
“And what if it doesn’t sell? And where will we store it when we have to fly back? And who will continue to look after trying to sell it?” Sounding like a rapid-firing machine gun, I blew holes in his idea.
“True.”
“Well,” I said, my voice dripping in hesitation. “My van is pretty old. What if I bought a new car in Calgary and we drove it home?”
“Or out to Vancouver and the island and then home…”
And so we did.
Vehicle decision behind us, our schedule started to fill up with more names and locations to visit.
“This could be a real dog and pony show,” Mark remarked.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It may be busier than a presidential candidate in September in Wisconsin. Are you up for this?”
“Maybe we should get t-shirts made up? Like those rock concert ones with tour dates,” he suggested.
We didn’t. But if we did it might have looked like this…
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And that, dear friends, is how a weekend visit to Alberta evolved into a three week trip spanning about 2/3 of our huge country.
Read the other parts of our Cross Canada adventure here.