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The anticipation of a road trip has its usual consequences, in writing about the long stretches of the trip to Pouch that would be less than thrilling, I looked for ways to avoid them.

I know that I wouldn’t take the Northern U.S. route as it is nothing but tolls and I cannot see paying money when I don’t have to – remember being a backwards, hateful skitcher, I still have to support my film habit.

I could go further north, however. This was a fantasy a couple of years ago racing to the overly crowded border at Sarnia and then replacing NPR with CBC. In a moment of pure lunacy I did check to see how out of the way going via Thunder Bay would be – too far – a pity – missing all of lower Ontario up to the Québec border.

Returning to the possible. I could see turning the trip into the type of outing that I like to do. While having to head through Toronto and Montréal, I could some of my secret drops at houses along the way – an international version of what I do around here, drive up, drop something off and leave without detection. There are still packages that haven’t been found up and down – well down – the east coast.

Three drops in Toronto, one in Montréal, the southern shore of the St Lawrence – being tempted to cross over to the northern shore and my ultimate outing through Labrador.

I would miss northern Maine and thought about an even more obscure crossing not at I-95 but at Calais, but that would be balanced by even more time on the Trans Canada and being tempted by a diversion to the Gaspé – as well as being away form the national paranoia of the land above Mexico, would more than make up for that.