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A Day of Rest

Today has been a day of rest, as you can see even the chairs are bigger here in Canada. Every house has these (normal size) on the patio which are called Adirondack chairs designed and patented in 1903 in America but according to Wikipedia, since the 1980s they have been marketed in Canada as Muskoka chairs despite the fact that the design did not originate in Muskoka (a region on Ontario), gosh isn’t this blog interesting. Whatever they are called they are very comfortable.
By popular request (Jake) I will say a little more about our “Compact Car”. It is actually a compact lorry, it is huge, four people could sit side by side on the back seat and it is a long way off the ground when getting in or out. It has a 5.7 litre V8 engine, lorries have 5 litre engines, not cars. When you put your foot down it does get a move on but with soft suspension it is not the sort of car for doing anything quickly. I can only think the engine size is to do with bragging rights in the bar, “mines 5.7, yours is only 5!” The speed limit, which everyone seems to follow, is 60mph most of the time and occasionally 70mph so you don’t go anywhere quickly.

Goodness knows what the locals would make of a Caterham 7, it would fit in the back of our truck which is brand new, it was registered last month, I suspect like all hire companies ours had found itself short of cars and is buying anything they can get their hands on.

It has a fancy display that tells us we are getting 100km to 11 litres of fuel which if my maths is correct is about 25 miles per gallon (real gallons, not the US half measures of 6 pints). But fear not for our bank balance, petrol is only £1.10 a litre although we are not helping the environment one bit.

Talking of fuel we suddenly found ourselves short of fuel yesterday so asked the sat nav to direct us to the nearest petrol station, it said it was 19km away so off we went eventually driving onto an industrial estate where we “Arrived at our destination”, it was the oil depot where the tankers fill up which did not have any pumps for the public. Perhaps the truck was telling me I ought to buy fuel in bulk.

Tomorrow we have a long drive along what we hope will be a beautiful coast to Halifax for the next stage of our adventure.