I’d been riding on sideroads most of the day. Glorious stretches of road cupped by green fields and flowers as if growing crops was secondary to pleasing travelers. Most any sideroad is better than an expressway on a motorcycle. The expressway is the multivitamin of roadtripping – full of the essential components but distilled from the essence of the experience. It’s moving from Point A to Point B inspite of the line between.
On a small motorcycle like my CB360 it’s dangerous too. The bike is slow, 20 horsepower if not less. The engine screams and buzzes, numbing your hands as traffic speeds by in the fast lane. I can’t help but feel like to be the wounded gazelle in the herd.
That’s why I stick to sideroads when possible. In this part of Ontario though, there are so many lakes that most any road ends in water. On a map they look like floor splattered paint, leaving the mind to wonder about the geological processes that create a pattern like that. Consulting the GPS on my iPhone just off the edge of Hwy 11 did reveal one road connecting to my final destination – small and twisty, occasionally kissing the edge of a lake and ending just outside of town. I noted the distance, some landmarks and rode to it.
It was twisty – twisty and paved. Paved until it wasn’t. The gravel transition came suddenly and I just about slid into the ditch. I debated turning around but continued and was rewarded. Gravel turned to hard-packed dirt which has just the right amount slide and creates a satisfying dust cloud behind – I imagined I was in the Paris-Dakar rally. It didn’t last – first gravel, then sand, then sand with rocks like shark’s teeth. The riding was becoming more difficult.
I crossed a rickety bridge of the Indiana Jones variety, reinforced with two wooden planks along its length and had I been in a car I would have probably not crossed it. The sharks tooth road continued up a hill and wound deeper into the woods. I hoped at every corner that the rocks would disappear and the Dakar dirt would return but they remained. The road further narrowed and eventually ended at a wall of trees.
I checked my GPS realized I’d made a wrong turn. I returned to the previous branch and found the road was clean from rocks and much wider. But not five kilometers later it too ended at a large metal shed. Again I checked my GPS, I was on the right track. Two men sat inside the shed. I got off my bike and walked inside for directions.
The first guy sported a unkempt Bryan Adams haircut and wrenched on an ATV. The other was balding and had piercing blue eyes, half-closed in a sly way; he sat slouched in a lawn chair smoking a cigarette. I inquired about the road and showed them my GPS map.
“That road don’t exist no more,” the first guy said.
“Yeah, not for ’bout 10 years now,” the second added.
I couldn’t understand how could the GPS could be so wrong. I considered they might be lying or misinformed but the shed in the middle of the road and substantial forest behind it suggested it’d been there a long time. The two guys recommended alternate routes but must have been oblivious to the look of confusion on my face. Make a left at this rock, right at the downed tree and pass some other landmark only a local could find. They even mentioned a bridge that sounded like the one I had crossed earlier. I let them finish, said thank you and decided to cut my losses, trace my path back to the paved road and abandon this little detour.
As a footnote, when I eventually arrived where I was headed, I checked a regular paper map and sure enough found the road clearly ended where the shed would have been. So much for accurate and reliable GPS, I’ll be traveling with a proper map from now on. Oh, and the date on the map… 2001. Nine years old and more accurate than Google Maps, go figure.
