Regina traffic

The day after I'm home from Vancouver and back, my body starts to react. Someone shut off the lube pumps and went home. Feels like I'm wearing a wooden box.

I drove my lower back through fog, thick rain, frost, night, stale Fresca and 3,500 km first with Tom (who insisted on driving the last 45 km from Chilliwack, which took two hours) then with Lucy, who always finds that last couple of hours from Swift Current to be the toughest. To help, I asked her to start the LocoLog, a listing of locomotives: where they are, which directing they're heading, the date and time. "When you encounter 8809 again in three years, you'll be thrilled," is how I put it to Lucy. "I don't think so," she said, but she got the log going anyway.

In the Main and East 19th Avenue area of Vancouver, stores full of hundred-year-old furniture stacked to the ceiling stand next to the hippest indie record store in the city (judging by its mention that very day in the BC edition of the Globe). Neglected house and yards back onto the newest of renovations, in either case the houses having been owned by the same family for three or more generations.

By comparison the prairie seemed open and alone when we crossed it. And today Regina traffic hardly moves.