Before transferring to UNH, I spent my first two years of college in Ottawa, Canada before covid unfortunately brought me home and the border closed. So, when spring break rolled around this semester, I thought it would be fun to go visit my old roommates and friends that I hadn’t seen in over two years. Everyone booked trips to sunny, warm Florida and I packed my bags for snowy, slippery, frostbite city.
I’ll preface this article by saying that the trip itself was actually very pleasant, I had a wonderful time. It was just the drive up there that was a nightmare. Yes, drive. I decided to drive the 7 hours to Ottawa by myself on a Friday afternoon. There are a series of distinct nightmares that I ran into, each one worse than the one before.
Our story starts on Thursday afternoon, desperately trying to get all my paperwork together to cross the border and trying to find one single place to get a rapid covid test. It seemed that nowhere was able to give me a rapid covid test which was getting exceedingly frustrating. That and the fact that I had to download an app called arivecan where I had to upload a multitude of documents and map out my route to Canada, including which border crossing I planned to go to.
Finally my doctors office called me to let me know that, although I couldn’t get a rapid test, they could give me a PCR test and assured me I would have the results back by the time I was crossing the border on Friday. Sensational. Friday morning came around, my dad and I plugged the route I was taking into my gps, and I was off!
Flash forward to me, scream singing in the car, about an hour and a half into the drive feeling good. My phone lit up, caller ID notifying me that it was my doctor’s office. Yes! I thought, my covid results. “Hi, is this Hannah? I just wanted to let you know that the covid test you took is in the lab and you’ll probably get the results by Monday!” said the cheerful nurse on the phone. I slammed on my brakes so hard I’m surprised the car behind me didn’t spin out. I pulled over to the guard rail on the side of the highway, stressed to say the least.
“I am ON my way to Canada right now” I said back. I explained that the nurse the day before had told me I would have my results between noon and 3pm. Her tone changed “Ohhh, I’m so soooory” she said in a higher pitched whiny voice. She then proceeded to tell me that PCR’s never come back in a day and she didn’t know who I talked to the day before. Flustered, I hung up the phone and did what any independent 22 year old woman would do. I called my mommy. I could hear her disappointment for me in the phone.
“Why don’t you come home and we can figure out another time for you to go up there?” But I was not prepared to give up after all the packing, paperwork, and excitement that I had already put myself through. Somehow through the shitty crackling lack of cell phone service we were able to yell through the phone to each other coherently enough to book me an actual rapid covid test in Manchester, an hour behind me. So I throttled my 2007 Mitsubishi Outlander off the side of the highway and trekked an hour in the opposite direction.
After an hour of headache induced eye rolling and panic sweating, I pulled into a parking lot, had a woman shove a test up my nose, and I was off again! Just…two hours later than I wanted to be. My results were emailed and texted to me within thirty minutes and I downloaded them and screenshotted them just in case I lost service further up. Queue more scream singing and head bobbing. Despite the rather large detour I was back on track and feeling good again.
It’s important to note that my father had carefully mapped out my route for me so that I would avoid all the major border crossings and I could swing seamlessly through a tiny one man crossing that we always used when we traveled up there as a family. So I had two stops on my gps. The first one in Alburgh Vermont that would bring me to the border, the second one my roommate’s address.
Many hours passed by and I was in absolute nowhere Vermont in the middle of the night. I looked down at my phone to see I had 5 minutes left until my first stop was complete. It seemed strange to me, a grocery store was nowhere in sight let alone an international border crossing. Dubious, I kept going. 3 minutes left. My eyebrows furrowed. The last direction told me to take a right. I cannot for the life of me remember what the name of this road was called, but my friends and I referred to it for the rest of the trip as “Frisk Lane”; it was something off-putting like that and I most DEFINITELY was frisked by this silly little road.
Nothing about this seemed right, but then I remembered that I usually slept on the ride to Canada with my family, and when I woke up at the border it always was on a small road in the middle of nowhere. So I took my chances and turned down Frisk Lane. Let me paint a picture. This was a one lane dirt road, a steep and immediate death drop off to my right, and a large snowbank that stretched as far as I could see to my left. There were houses to my left, all with those comforting “No Trespassing” signs posted on trees right outside.
In spite of this sounding astonishingly like the warm up to a full fledged horror film, I was still in a healthy state of denial as I practically four-wheeled down this pothole ridden hell road. Then my gps let out a little death rattle that sounded a lot like “You have reached your destination”. I slowed to a halt and looked ahead at the endless dirt road that quite literally disappeared into the abyss. Not to alarm you but I actually had not reached my destination! I sat there blinking for a couple minutes and then it hit me that maybe the first destination in my phone was actually just bringing me to the town in Vermont I needed to be in, and that my second destination would actually get me over the border. So I started up my final route. Crisis averted! I was once again informed by the death rattle to drive all the way to the end of Frisk Lane before simply turning around and driving all the way back out to recenter myself. I was not about to waste the minute and thirty seconds it would take to do that, so my insanely high IQ and acute survival instincts told me instead to make a 300 point turn right where I was, which I’ll remind you was a one lane dirt road with a cliff to the right and a snow tsunami to the left. I should also mention we literally call my car “the boat” in my friend group because of how big it is.
Drive. Okay reverse. Okay drive. Okay reverse. And then my car stopped. See, while I was safely and responsibly trying not to fall to my death off the cliff, I got stuck in the snow. More driving and reversing seemed to result in nothing other than my tire starting to smoke. This was unfortunately not one of those instances when I could call my dad for “car help” as he would sooner send a hit man than hear that my high IQ and acute survival skills had gotten me stuck in the snow in an arguably dangerous part of Vermont in the dead of night. So I called the police…? Not the actual police but I googled Alburgh police department. I don’t know I had no idea WHAT to do. I figured it was either that or knock on someone’s door and ask them to help me but for some odd reason the “No Trespassing” signs were telling me not to do that.
There were, of course, no police stations to be found in Alburgh so I called the next town over, immediately starting to ramble about “I’m not from Vermont, I don’t know where I am, I’m stuck in the snow” blah blah blah. “Okay so call a tow truck.” And with that the woman on the phone hung up. The ATTITUDE. Also, WHAT tow truck I didn’t even know where the hell I was let alone the local towing companies. It quite honestly did not feel like this was really happening. I figured this wasn’t where I was going to die so there was some way that I could get out of this. It took me all of thirty seconds to put my hands over my face and will this mess to be a fever dream when a thought popped into my head. I looked down to see that my car was in two wheel drive. Stunned, I clicked it into four wheel drive and gently pressed the gas pedal. I immediately drove out of the snow. Unreal. Since whoever was controlling the simulation during this trip seemed to be having a field day with me, I did my due diligence and drove all the way to the end of the road, turned around, and drove all the way back out again, dramatically vowing to never return to the hateful place that is Frisk Lane.
Finally, finally, finally I was back on pavement and actually headed to the border this time. If I thought Frisk Lane was a dream, I knew this next part wasn’t happening. A fog of surrealness actually swallowed my limp body and my brain did a shut down and restart. I was at long last at the border after the drive all the way there from Frisk Lane. The little hut sat empty, an orange cone stood menacingly in front of it, and the road past the crossing was physically blocked by a cement barrier. Respectfully, no. So I literally pulled into the employee parking lot and decided I would just bang on the doors of the government building to the left of the crossing screaming and crying until someone helped me. However I made it one inch from my car when two policemen hands on guns charged from the building I had just been planning to throw myself against in angst. Like any innocent person would, I threw my hands in the air hoping no guns would be removed from any holsters. Tears began to well in my eyes this time.
“I’m literally just trying to get across the border,” I whimpered. Hands still firmly placed on guns, the officers asked me if I was there to pick anyone up. I was filled with dread and once again assured them that I was there for no one. I was simply just trying to cross the border and get to my old roommates house. Eventually after some suspicious questions were thrown my way, they informed me that the little border I was at was closed for the night and I would have to drive to a new one.
So I hopped back in my car and drove to the border I was trying to avoid the entire time. My journey was at last coming to an end as I pulled up to the large border crossing, providing my passport and covid test. This is the last leg of the trip. At least you’re across the border now I thought to myself. I still had two hours left on the gps to get to my roommates. As if Canada heard that I was coming to town, the second my tire was an inch past the border, the worst blizzard I have ever seen in my life touched down. For the next three and a half hours I cruised at 40 miles per hour, my car slipping, zero visibility more than a foot in front of me, and time just kept adding to the gps. I was supposed to be at the border between five and six. I was supposed to have been in Ottawa at my roommate’s between eight and nine.
I pulled into her driveway at 2:03am, after driving for twelve hours straight. We parked in an overnight garage, walked back through the fresh snow to her house and went to bed. The remainder of my weekend trip to Canada was fabulous. Everyone texted me when I arrived, “How was the trip!?”
I replied to the group chat, “Oh. I have a story for you guys in the morning.”