Day # 109 – September 5th, 1995
Day # 109 – September 5th, 1995
Today is the first day of school and as we head back out to the road for another day, my thoughts are back in London. Sometimes I think I have asked too much of Jesse, and too much of his brothers Tyler and Tim. I’ll have to make it up to them when we get home.
Our day starts out with us getting lost. (It’s not the first time this has happened.) We arrive in Bowmanville at 9:15 and by 9:30 everything has been checked, batteries, water, ice, snacks, clean towels and additional clean journey shirts for Jesse and me and the road crew. Two more helpers from London, Sonja and Anwyn from the television station have joined us for the day, and as soon as we are on the road, they are right into working the traffic and collecting donations. As I push Jesse along the road, I have a feeling that I don’t have the stamina that I started out with at the Manitoba border more than a hundred days ago.
We have been blessed that no one has been injured on this journey, but there were sure some strange happenings on the road today. A lady who passed us and is looking back and waving, almost runs into our escort van. Then there was a motorist who ran into the sidewalk and ruined a couple of hubcaps, but still made a donation. Fortunately, neither of these drivers was going very fast.
The most interesting donation of the day was from a farmer who was working a field with a wagon and two horses and stopped what he was doing to come to the roadside to make a donation.
And then the day got stranger.
At noon hour there was a change of guard with the OPP and we got a new escort officer, a lady named Kelly, and she was great.
We were approached by a man who said he was ‘missing’ from Kingston. It was evident to me that he was struggling with some form of mental stress. He
said he hadn’t eaten in four days. When he got into the police cruiser to ride for a while, I cautioned Kelly that when this man is sitting in the front passenger seat, he is sitting on your ‘gun side.’
A short while later two OPP cruisers arrived and the officers took the man away. Kelly meanwhile chased two other drivers, one who passed us going too fast and a second driver who had no current license and crossed a double white line in in passing us in a truck with no muffler. Kelly told him to ‘get that thing off the road.’ And then there was another driver passed us and then backed up at about 60 miles an hour to make a donation! All in all, a pretty strange day on the road.
At the end of the day, we drove to our motel in Cobourg but had to wait on the main street for a movie crew shooting a chase scene. I don’t know what the movie was called but one of the actors was Kelly McGillis, who was in Top Gun. It has been a summer of trying to make sure that Jesse also got to the movies. Like a lot of kids, he wanted to see the two big movies of the summer, Batman and Apollo 13. We made sure he saw them both.
We had dinner at our motel and while Sean looked after Jesse, Sherene and I had a chance to talk alone. It seemed like this was the first time in months that we were able to have that kind of conversation.
After Sherene left I went to bed. My neck is very sore, and my muscles are tired. I’m getting very close to being ready to go home. Sonja and Anwyn both told me I looked exhausted. I hope they’re wrong. 15 more days to go.
