Trust Me, I'll Take You Right Downtown
Local knowledge helped some truckers access central Ottawa.
Part 1: A Fisherman, a Truck & a Train Horn
Having departed Halifax with the Freedom Convoy, on the second night after leaving home Mark parked his truck on a farm 20 minutes inside the Ontario border, an hour short of Parliament Hill. Herb's Travel Plaza was overflowing with trucks, so a nearby farm became another hub.
A video he filmed that evening shows a row of seven banquet tables lined up end-to-end in a garage. They're covered in donated food. Sandwiches, snacks, home baked goods, cups of coffee, bottles of water. He remembers thinking "I don't know what we're getting into, but this is giant."
It felt, he says, "like the whole country was wrapped around every one of those 18 wheelers. It was just amazing."
Before he left home, says Mark, "My wife packed me all up. I had a generator, so I had a microwave oven." Due to the cold weather, there was no problem keeping those frozen meals frozen. "But I never used any of it - not one bit." At the farm that evening he was well fed. On other occasions, he says, food "was brought to the truck, it was laid out in trailers."
The following day, as he got close to Ottawa, a man driving a pickup in front of him appeared at his window. "At one of these lights, this guy gets out of his half-ton truck. He said, 'You don't know me, but if you follow me, I got a better path for you.' He said, 'We all don't like that guy here,'" referring to the Prime Minister. Mark believes the man was an Ottawa resident.
So he said, 'You follow me, you can trust me and I'll take you right down, a better way to get in there with that big truck.' And he did. He guided me right downtown. Actually, he brought two more trucks down there after that, he parked two more in the same spot that I was.
next installment: 14 Parking Tickets
Beautiful!