Driving in Canada


Canada is such a nice place. It’s so nice that if you forget which country you’re in and start driving your car down the wrong side of the road, people don’t honk their horns or gesticulate at you, they just pause their driving,for a few moments to look either confused or horrified, until you figure outfit yourself why all the cars on your side of the road are pointing in the wrong direction.

We picked up our hire car easily enough, although we didn’t realize that the name on your driving license has to match the name on your credit card. I couldn’t go round renting cars for my wife as some sore of surprise automotive treat, and because of my evil schemes to deny her financial independence, she has no credit cards of her own. It could have ended badly but Enterprise eventually let me hire a car in ny name, and after twenty minutes we’d fathomed out the instructions for the car seat and loaded our child into the vehicle.

We drove from Dartmouth to Woodville today, on the other side of Nova Scotia. Last time we did this we got terrifically lost and had to rely on directions from a stoned woman in a bong shop and a man in a gas station whose idea of landmarks included such gems as “the barn that used to be there” and “the road”. This time, we had satellite navigation.

My Nokia has fairly good navigation facilities, although every time we change country it resets the navigation voice to “None” when it’s previously been set to “supercilious man” or “annoyed woman”. We upgraded to “Surfer Dude”, whose stoned tones are actually quite calming, even after the joke of “take the next right – that’s your right, not ny right” wears off. (The joke wears off somewhere before the first time you hear it.) Since we didn’t need any sort of data connection for the sat nav to work, it was cheaper than having to hire a dedicated sat nav, or having a two hour argument about who can / cannot interpret maps properly.

Our hire car is a Hyundai Sonata. It’s a metallic blue-black colour, with a USB socket that makes it an enormous, four wheeled iPod dock, and a boot that can be opened remotely by pressing down on the key fob. This seems to be a common thing in Canada, if the two hire cars I’ve driven are anything to go by. I don’t know why hands free operation of the lid of your car’s boot should be so important. Perhaps it’s to prevent unprotected hands from sticking to cold metal in the freezing depths of winter, buy you’d think most Canadians would be smart enough to wear gloves, and they’d still need to close the boot afterwards.

It’s an automatic, which always fills me with trepidation, but we drove 45 miles without me crashing, so no complaints there. As soon as I got out of the car, I was besieged by small children and forced to jump on a trampoline, which was fun until the freezing cold air and the assorted hair and dander of three dogs, two cats and a bunch of humans left me having some sort of asthma attack, hardly capable of standing. I’d taken some Piritize to stave off the potential allergic reactions but it took a couple of hours to kick in (or for my body to reach adjust by itself) and throughout that time the world seemed at an end.

We walked down the road to my wife’s aunt’s house, and met some large dogs, a lot of dead flies and a big pile of wood. These are not the only exciting things in Canada, but now the battery is close to death on my phone, I must cease writing for tonight.


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