Final Night in Ottawa

'I had a bad feeling in my stomach. I didn't sleep.'

Part 1: The Church in the Greenhouse (trucker Bill’s story)

Random photo of Freedom Convoy trucks, taken by me.

Bill remembers his last evening in Ottawa:

I went back to my hotel room. They were closing the city down, so I had to walk beside the Rideau Canal, in behind the Chateau Laurier, and I had to come out by the US embassy, through a park. That's how I had to get to my hotel room.

Harold wasn't there. I had a bad feeling in my stomach. I didn't sleep. Saturday morning, five o'clock in the morning, I said 'That's it.' I packed my bag. I don't know whether I phoned Harold or texted him. I said, 'I'm leaving. I've a gut feeling something's going to happen today.'

Bill's big rig is a Jonker-owned truck. Rather than removing it from Wellington Street, Harold urges Bill to drive home in Harold's pickup instead, which is in the hotel's underground parking lot.

By then, the downtown core is riddled with checkpoints. A pair of officers, male and female, insist on giving Bill a police escort. "'You follow me out of town,' the cop said. I had to follow them to a ramp to the 417 [highway]. They pulled over, they waved, and I drove home."

A bit later, "I don't know how many hours later," says Bill. "My poor truck. They were ripping my sign off with that frontend loader. And they ripped the license plate off. They didn't unscrew it, they ripped it off. Then they towed it."

The following weekend, he’s part of a small southern Ontario convoy that drives six hours back to Ottawa to retrieve vehicles from the impound lot:

Harold said, 'We're going to get the trucks.' So we went up to this works yard near Ottawa. Harold had to pay the fees. I put the license plate back on, and the truck started. But the other Jonker truck, they smashed the window in the bunk. Don't ask me why. And the passenger window. It was full of snow.

Overall, he says, the damage wasn't too severe, "But some of those guys in the front row in Ottawa, everything was wrecked."

final installment: Never Refused Entry to America