Road Zen - My parents live a 4.5 - 5 hour drive away from me. It is mostly tight and twisty back-roads without homes or other cars for kilometers. I do the drive about six times a year and I know the turns and best overtaking places along the route, I know where the cops usually wait and I know all the best places to pee (many of the good sites are inaccessible when there is snow).

When I moved to Ottawa, the drive seemed like this insurmountable obstacle and I feared the hours in the car, despite the fact that in those days I had company and didn't have to drive much. It would take me hours to get comfortable and in winter I was always cold. The conversations were incredible but the drive was almost always done in the dark. Then I got a standard car, which I couldn't drive! And then I started having to do the drive alone. Five hours in a car alone with my thoughts. Five hours of empty roads and empty countryside. Five hours of turning and stopping and going, and .... !!! FIVE HOURS! Five hours with just me.

I have broken the drive down in my head into landmarks that remind me how far I have to go. There is the boring but usually fast stretch from Ottawa to Renfrew, and then the stretch from Renfrew to Denbigh which is pretty and has some great spots for overtaking. And then my favorite stretch from Denbigh to Hardwood Lake (tight and twisty all the way). The next stretch is from Hardwood Lake to Tory Hill, which is broken up with Bancroft in the middle. The fourth stretch includes my recently found "short cut" from Tory Hill to Norland, I used to go through Minden but have taken 30 - 40mins off with this scenic route which includes a shoe-tree. Then there is the home stretch, from Norland to Orillia.

I drive through some of the most incredible countryside and it makes me happy and grateful to be in Canada where we have space and I can drive like this. There are the fields and the rocky terrain around Canada's mining capital, there are the lakes and in winter the sky seems to blue and the trees so white. There are small little houses tucked in besides rivers and Kawartha Lake ice-cream with its 30 minute lines. It is a varied drive where I pass lakes filled with canoes or cross snowmobile paths. There are cows and sheep and horses and gardens covered in plastic ornaments or the cowboy shadow cut out (why I ask you! WHY?) And every time I do the drive I see something new.

Today I did the drive in four hours and 35mins and I have a few observations on driving Ontario's smaller highways:

• There is always at least one "Farmer Fud" on the road. Someone who drives below the speed limit and just potters long enjoying the scenery. I am happy that they are not in a rush and are reveling in countryside vistas, but when you have 400km's to cover, 60km/h is not helpful.
• Worse yet are the people who drive 90km/h. The speed limit on most of the routes is 80km/h (which means I do around 99km/h). At least Farmer Fud is easy to overtake. Trying to get past these takes a little more skill, you need to break the speed limit to get around them safely and they have a bad habit of speeding up to 95km/h on the straight stretches. 
• There is a special place in hell for people who break hard through bends. I am not saying that your should not break for a bend in the road ... but seriously people! These are actually the people who cause me the most road rage. They kill the Zen of the curve and the feel of the car as it banks by doing it all at 40km even when the roads are dry (again, in an 80 zone!)
• It takes me 100km to find my groove and let go of all the Farmer Fuds and Heavy Breakers of this world. After this I find my groove, I embrace the Zen of driving and am ready to go with the flow and settle in for 4 more hours of roads.

My most important realisation is that I love the five hours I have with myself. In this crazy world where things are always happening, I find the drive one of the few times where all I can do is think and be. For 300 minutes it is just me and the road, the bends, the trees and the sky. It is in the last 300km that I find my peace.