The dog and I are going to visit a number of friends in Ontario at the end of the month, and as is my wont, I’ve already planned several different potential routes to get there and back, but I know exactly what route I’m going to take. I’ll drive south on the Maine Turnpike, through New Hampshire, avoid Boston via I-495, and then take the Massachusetts Turnpike and the New York State Thruway to the border near Niagara Falls, and from there it’s a quick jog to my first stop in Hamilton, Ontario. I’ll spend a few days there and then head on the 401 on a straight shot to Belleville, where I’ll get off the highway and circle on the winding roads of Prince Edward County til I visit my second stop, visiting my friends (including prolific commentator Viktoria). Then after a few days of very intense conversation, I’m sure, and lots of hugs, I’ll get back on the 401 until I get to Quebec, where I’ll take the autoroute into Montreal and a steak dinner with my friend from Calgary before loading up a cooler with Montreal smoked meat from Schwartz’s Deli and the final push back to Maine. Google says it’s 1289 miles, which sounds about right.
Who cares, Freilinger, I hear you all saying. This is a blog, not a trip planning site.
Well, I’m excited because the route is a virtual king’s tour of the East Coast’s full service rest stops. The advantage of taking toll roads in North America, at least eastern North America, is you get a lot of rest stops. And since I’ll have the dog with me, I’ll need to use them, at least every couple of hours or so. Mediocre coffee, people watching, institutional architecture, my dog, and motorways – who could ask for anything more? Well, other than a romantic companion, but let’s get real.
One of my favorite posts ever (at least to write) was a critical examination of rest stops, mostly in the western part of the continent, and some comments on the rest stops of France and England. But my love for rest stops was formed on the toll highways east of the Mississippi. I grew up going on long road trips, to visit my parents’ families in the midwest and to escape the Maine late season chills on spring holidays to the south, and rest stops were core parts of those adventures. Even though my mom would pack a large cooler filled with sandwiches, snacks, fruit, sodas, chips, and more, my sister and I would plead to stop at the Garden State Parkway rest stop just over the New York border, or the Clara Barton Memorial Rest Stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, or one of the huge center median rest stops in Delaware or Maryland. It was an adventure of unknown fast food franchises, blinking arcade games, gift shops, and concrete, with the constant sound of traffic in the background and, for reasons I never fully understood, always a strong breeze whipping up the proudly arrayed flags of nation, state, county, and local transportation authority.
New Hampshire doesn’t technically have a rest stop on the southbound route; they have a state liquor store, however, and they have a very nice lawn on which the dog will enjoy his first pit stop, about an hour away from departure. I’ll use the stop as an opportunity to get cut-rate liquor for gifts; New Hampshire makes its money by undercutting retail liquor prices in Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts, and that huge volume of booze sales, plus lottery tickets, overpriced tolls, and insanely high property taxes, allows New Hampshire to avoid a state sales tax or income tax. I’ll contribute my dollars to their state’s fiscal health, the dog will contribute his part to their lawns, and we’ll be on our way.
There’s a Mass Pike rest stop conveniently located to capture the traffic coming off I-495 and quickly exiting onto I-84 to get to New York City but it’s usually a disappointment. At the top of a long hill, the parking lot completely covers the available space, leaving only tiny strips of grass for a dog to enjoy. It was regularly under construction whenever I’ve used it in the past, and there’s been little consistency to the chains inside, McDonald’s and Burger King switching several times and Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts also competing for the caffeine monopoly. I have a feeling there is a lot of wholesale drug dealing that goes on there – the location is too perfect, enabling large-scale drug mules from New York and points south to conveniently distribute to all of northern New England and Boston while at the same time getting a bite to eat – although I’ve never been a witness to any such activity and have no intention of seeking it out. In any event, I’ll probably not stop there as again, it’s as much about the dog as it is about my aesthetic pleasures, and it’s a lousy spot for the dog.
We’ll deadhead out to the rest plaza at Blandford, which is about fifty miles west of the narcotics caravanserai. It’s the last major westbound service area on the Mass Pike, and as such has a larger selection of fast food and a bigger lawn for the dog. At this point it should be around 11am if all goes well (assuming I leave home in Maine around 8am after giving the dog a proper morning walk and his brekkie), and I won’t be that hungry but I will be tempted by whoever currently holds the concessions rights. Most likely it’ll be just a 15 minute walk, coffee refill, and cigarette break.
From there, the New York Thruway beckons…. ah, New York. Poorly funded maintenance budgets means that, unless you’re traveling in the two or three years after a major resurfacing project, itself only undertaken every few decades, you’re in for three hundred miles of jaw-numbing potholes and the steady drone of your tires in the ruts created by endless convoys of eighteen or more wheeled trucks. It will make me long for French toll roads and their whisper-smooth tarmac, even for the relatively untrammeled expanse of I-94 through North Dakota and Montana. But those roads do not have the service palaces of the New York Thruway.
At least, I think the New York Thruway has service palaces. I haven’t been on that particular stretch of road in almost twenty-five years, and back then I was traveling eastbound, with a friend who was driving back from the west coast and who picked me up at my girlfriend’s place in La Jolla, California. We drove non-stop for four days; one of us would sleep while the other drove at night, and we kept one another up during the day with hot coffee, maxed out air conditioning, conversations about women and future lives, and rest stop food. We hit the Thruway late at night and I only remember brightly lit gas pumps with the gasoline at the then-shocking price of $1.299 per gallon, highway robbery after driving through Oklahoma and paying $0.899 per.
The trouble here will be the midday walk. I like to give the dog a solid midday walk even when on road trips, which means a half hour or so, and we’ll unfortunately be in the middle of nowhere. I’ll likely just get off at an exit, find a remote country road, and take him for a stroll – upstate New York is good for that and it’s late enough in the season that there should be nothing but springtime loveliness around – but it also means I’ll almost certainly not need to stop at a rest area. I’m also somewhat on the fence about how far I want to go on the first day anyway; I’m shooting to get to Hamilton late in the afternoon on the second day, and that means I really shouldn’t push things too far across New York on day one.
So more than likely, I’m going to save my New York service plazas for the second day. I’m not sure they’re living up to memory, however. The New York State Thruway Authority has a convenient interactive map showing the locations of each rest stop, with hyperlinks that let you see what services are available and, unfortunately, also giving you a photograph. The photos look like they were taken by a drunk guy who climbed on top of a large truck and then accidentally used one of the false color settings on his iPhone to wash out any blue tones. The rest stops have a noticeable lack of green grass (although this may just be the fault of the drunk guy – there are grassy areas, they just don’t appear to be green). I remember these when I was a kid as mid-century monuments to airstream modernism, with a sit down restaurant on one end (usually Bob’s Big Boy) and a “regular” fast food place, Burger King or Roy Roger’s or Hardees, at the other, and an arcade and an I❤️New York gift shop in the middle. The bathrooms were insanely large – or at least the men’s rooms were, having no knowledge of the ladies’. They were the size of my school gymnasium with multiple rows of 10 or 15 urinals in the center and around the edge of the room the forbidding looking stalls, with sinks and inevitably out-of-order hot air hand dryers in a gigantic alcove by the entry. Renovations since then – it has been thirty years, I suppose – seem to have been done at the tail end of the 1977-1994 “dead zone” where the after effects of inflation, Reagan-era budget cuts, the love of plastic, and a curious fascination with high ceiling atriums led to the worst of roadside American architecture.
Also it appears from the Thruway website that Roy Rogers has a kind of lock on the fast food franchising. I’m not a fan of Roy Rogers, although they were the first chain that I knew of that put onion rings on bacon cheeseburgers, which is admittedly delicious – or at least, I used to find them delicious before my body got in shape and started sending signals to my brain that such delicacies were, in fact, crap.
So maybe it’ll be a fast shot across western New York. The dog will get his walks in, of course, and I’ll get coffee breaks and fill the tank before heading across the border, but based on casual web research, I don’t think I’ll linger. Plus Ontario awaits.
I was in Ontario just last fall, and the roads have been recently repaved and the rest stops recently renovated in that gleaming, white metal and glass wall style that says “We’re for the millennial generation”. Which is odd, really, because millennials seem not to road trip the way my generation or my parents’ generation did, but Ontario is aging so I guess the tax base was more than happy to pay for the upgrades. In any event, once I cross the border and hit the Queen Elizabeth Way, I’m basically a straight shot into Hamilton. We’ll climb up the Ontario escarpment and the dog will get a majestic early afternoon walk across the ridge, Toronto and Mississauga’s spires glimmering in the distance, the lake shiny beneath our feet, the air crisp and spring clear. At least I hope so – it’s still a few weeks away. It could be raining.
The 401 is an amazing road. Through the greater Toronto area it’s a road for the chariots of the gods, twelve lanes of main highway and usually two or three feeder lanes on each side in addition. I’ll drive east towards Prince Edward County on Sunday; last fall I drove the same road on a Sunday morning and averaged 150 km an hour and felt like I was standing still, scofflaw Ontario and Quebec license plates leaving me in the dust. And the rest areas were like paradise.
There’s a rest area on the M25 about twenty miles counterclockwise from Heathrow, at the 6 o’clock mark on the circle, which was being renovated while I lived in London and was finally completed just before I left, when I was doing a lot of driving back and forth to France. It was stunning, with an atrium larger than Terminal 5, or at least it felt that way, and an array of ethnic fast food places that was stunning for London. It had really awful burritos, passable Indian food, pizza, fish and chips, a Burger King, a vegan spot… for the M25, it was a revelation.
The rest areas on the 401 east of the Toronto suburbs are better.
The only difference is all the franchises are Canadian. I used to think that Canada is where North American franchises go to die, but I’ve come to realize that Canada is where franchises go to live forever in a kind of benign semi-retirement. For example – A&W, which was huge in the states when I was a kid. It was a rootbeer store that had car hop burger service, and for some reason it died out almost completely in the late 80s in the US but for clearly different reasons it remains a popular Canadian chain. And there will be an A&W at the ONRoute stop east of Belleville. I will get a frosted mug of rootbeer, so cold that the rootbeer creates a sludge along the sides of the glass, and I will get a burger from the A&W “family of burgers”. Will I get the Teen Burger? Or the Dad burger? Or the Junior? Who knows? But I will eat one of the family, my new healthy body’s pleas to the contrary notwithstanding. I’ll also, no doubt, fuel up at either a Canadian Tire or PetroCan pump.
I love Canada. I really can’t say how much I love Canada.
The best part of the Ontario rest stops, though, are the picnic areas alongside. It’ll probably be too early for the roads to be open but I can park nearby and the dog and I can go for a proper, long, lingering walk through orchards, neatly spaced picnic tables, long grass, and open skies. There’s a picnic area at the Port Hope ONRoute stop that we particularly enjoyed last fall. We went for an hour long walk, out in the great wide open, the wind shearing off the lake and making the dog’s fur stand on end and ears flap. I had a double double for the walk, draining it and dropping it in the helpfully spaced rubbish bins along the way. At the time, three quarters of the way out of Seattle going back to Maine on an October Sunday morning, it felt like traveling in the right direction, in the right way.
Land is cheap in Canada – at least, once you get out of the GTA – so I guess the Ontario Ministry of Transportation gets to indulge their deepest fantasies about what roadside stops can be. I applaud them. I share their dreams, and I am lucky to live in a world where my dreams have found a reality. Also where my dog’s dreams have found a reality – he can’t drink rootbeer, but he can enjoy the family of burgers, and he will leap out of the back of my car in sheer joy when he sees the picnic area and realizes what he is about to savor.
Then I’ll visit my friends in Prince Eddie. I’m sure I’ll write about that separately so let’s move on.
Quebec has much less to offer but since gas is more expensive and I really just want to eat smoked meat at Schwartz’s and good steak at Moishe’s, who cares. I’ll power through to Montreal, the dog and I will check into the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, I’ll take him for a walk, and I’ll eat. The next morning I’ll take him for a walk, I’ll go to Schwartz’s and get my bulk order, and we’ll head east on Autoroute 10 and just before the exit to Autoroute 55 towards the Vermont border, we’ll stop at the Magog rest area – or more precisely, the Aire de service de Memphrémagog.
Quebec in my memory used to have more rest areas, and last fall when driving on the A20 I saw what I remembered as being a full service rest area reduced to the status of just a “safety break” – some restrooms, an informational kiosk, some parking, and some grass for the dogs. It was a bit sad, frankly; back in the day there would have been an Autogrill with bad poutine and decent enough roast pork and crayons for the youngsters, but now nothing except toilets. Memphremagog, though, is in the old tradition, and moreover has been remade in the modern standard: exposed stone and wood beams, a cathedral ceiling with a fireplace, and a Rotisserie St Hubert and a Couche-Tard, the former for chicken and fries, the latter for coffee and Pringles. Because it’s Quebec, and land is even cheaper than in eastern Ontario, there is also a gigantic field for the dog, and it being spring, it will be wet and moist and thickly green but with pockets of deeper damp where the snowbanks used to be, and he will frolic and hopefully avoid the ticks. I’ll give him roast chicken as a treat, even though he’ll be thinking about the leftover steak and sides of brisket in the cooler.
And then we’ll head down the A55, cross the border into Vermont, and hit the much simpler, more western “Welcome to Vermont” stop on Interstate 91 a mile south of the customs station (or “les douanes” to the Quebecers). The Vermont and New Hampshire rest stops don’t have restaurants or gas stations, so the dog and I will just walk in the grass, on a high bluff overlooking northern Vermont fields and forests and farmsteads. I’ll start drinking the coffee I bought in Magog, which will inevitably be too hot to drink until much after purchase, and he’ll have some water and I’ll probably slip him some leftover steak as a treat. The next four hours into Maine and home will be twisty, turny, and quiet, but no more fast food – there is too much good roadside diner fare, too many remote country roads to amble on alongside the dog, too much to think about from a week with friends and a week away from the rest of life. Hopefully there will be big decisions to consider, but I’ll be patient. In a few hours, we’ll be home.
A flanneur is one who walks and observes and notes and records, for no reason than because what one sees when one walks is inherently interesting in a world where everything, indeed, is interesting, and worthy of love. I am a flanneur, but sometimes, I’m a flanneur d’autoroute. I can’t wait to hit the road.