Road Trip 2003 - Aug 14

Chris’s Uncle’s place

For those of you perhaps in the Maritimes who haven’t been watching the news, there is no power in pretty much all of Ontario and Eastern United States. Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Detroit, New York, Boston - all without power since 4:15pm EDT on Aug. 14, 2003. It has been dubbed Black Thursday. Not since 1965 has something of this magnitude happened. I am currently in a very dark basement in the house that belongs to Chris’s uncle and aunt. However, this was not where our adventure began. When the power actually went out, we had just pulled into a Sunoco gas station in Newmarket, ON. We had stopped for directions to a movie theatre. The people getting gas all of a sudden had a confused look on their faces… and the attendent came out to say that the power went out. So we got our directions and chuckled, glad we had filled up not very long before in a community called Goodwood, outside of Aurora. But when we got back on the road we realized that the traffic lights were out as well. We thought that a local power grid had gone down and proceeded to the Silvercity theatre. Then we heard on the radio about the vast scope of this outage and we were taken aback. I certainly was anyway. So we pulled off at the theatre (on Yonge Street) and made some calls. Then we headed back out on Yonge street heading towards Toronto to Chris’s uncle’s place. The 400 was fine heading south because everyone was leaving the city and not going into it. Then we got off the highway onto the Rutherford road and it was grid lock. It took us a good long while to get to the right street but once we were off that road we were fine. What a crazy adventure. Apparently this power is supposed to come on overnight… I guess we’ll have to see… and maybe re-evaluate our Canada’s Wonderland plans if there is still no power in the morning. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. :)

I’m tired and going to bed so I’ll have to recount the rest of our day later - basically we drove… it was pretty boring. But the story of yesterday in Ottawa will need to be told as well… all in due time.