A St. Lawrence kind of day

My navigation skills have never been major league quality, but I always found my way home so I take something from that.

If I've been somewhere before I can usually find it again - sometimes even before the fifth try - but it's when I'm searching for someplace new when I get into trouble. It was like that last year during a beer trip to Ottawa when I kept asking where the St. Lawrence River was in an effort to get my bearings, despite it being nearly 200 kilometres south, and my friends have never let me live it down.

It's like that often in my everyday life too, especially when I'm behind the wheel. I may have finally upgraded to hands-free calling in my car but hands-free GPS still eludes me.

But I try not to let my deficiencies hold me back and when I heard that (A) Wellington Brewery's Nothing Civil IPA was back and (B) Block Three Brewing had a Triple IPA on their shelves I really had no choice but to gas up the Spark and head west.

To quote Raptor legend Freddie VanVleet, I was going to bet on myself.

My route looked simple enough. Take the 401 to Kitchener and go north on #8 straight up to the little Mennonite town of St. Jacobs, the home of Block Three, a brewery I had heard great things about from my pal Matt, who brews for Wavemaker in neighboring Cambridge. From there, I would go back down to #7 and head east for a few minutes to Guelph and Wellington Brewery.

The first leg of my journey looked like a 15-minute trip when I planned it out, but I should have known it would turn out to be a St. Lawrence kind of day.

It took me nearly two hours.

My route (Artist rendition)

I crossed the Grand River at least twice, got turned around a half-dozen times, toured downtown Kitchener and got very familiar with Waterloo and its surrounding countryside, and generally got myself lost and had to pull over for another look at my GPS location more times than I cared to remember.

I also spent a considerable amount of time talking to myself. I tried to be kind at first, but my tone got sharper as the miles and minutes flew by and I began to question my own intelligence. It did not escalate to me yelling at God (or whoever is running things up there) and demanding to know why she had forsaken me or why she hated me so much but I came very close to the breaking point.

And then, inexplicably, I found it. St. Jacobs, not the brewery. Block Three, despite being located on the main drag, took a few more minutes and two u-turns to locate. Seems my GPS had it on the west side when it was on the east side, and even once I had that figured out I drove past it twice because it was set back quite a ways from the road.

No matter. I found it. It was open and they served beer.

I managed to resist telling my bartender all about my misadventures and only asked if he still had the Triple IPA - M, it was called, to commemorate their 1,000th brew. He did, he said, and turned to pour me a glass. "No," I responded quickly, holding up my hand. "I'm driving. Ten per cent beers are for home" and asked for a Norge Kveik Pale Ale; a more reasonable 5.5 per cent, to soothe my shattered psyche.

And after buying two of each of the IPAs, Pale Ales and Sours they had in the fridge, I headed back out, confident I could find my way to my next stop without any trouble. And promptly misread the highway sign and got off too early, delaying me another ten minutes until I found Highway 7 and the road to Guelph and Wellington Brewery. 

The Lacuna Collective

Located squarely on the main street, I didn't think this brewery would be hard to find and it wasn't, though I was looking left when it appeared on the right. More importantly, they had plenty of Nothing Civil, a 'liquid protest' IPA created by the Lacuna Collective (Poet and Beer Enthusiast Truth Is...,  certified Beer Sommelier Lexi Pham, and Beer Diversity founder Ren Navarro), with all the profits going to BLM Canada.

It is also a wonderful beer and one of my favourites of 2020.

This stop was the only time I felt a small tinge of regret for my clothing choices. It usually takes the threat of frostbite before I ditch the shorts and while it wasn't at that point yet, it had started to snow just a little and the brewery's take-out window was outside.

So I shivered for a minute or so until my order was processed and then as I walked back to my car I felt one more tinge of regret, this time for not using the facilities when I was at Block Three. Fortunately for me the back of the dumpster was available (sorry Wellington) and now, my bladder empty and warmed by my car's interior, I decided to tempt fate and try one more brewery before heading home.

Fixed Gear looked like a ten-minute drive away - easy-peasy - so I froze my route in my memory and continued west through Guelph.

You can probably guess by now that the journey was neither easy nor peasy, but after one accidental wrong turn and a detour caused by a road closure, I eventually found the brewery after only a half-hour or so of driving.

This time I was able to sit down and enjoy a pint of Trackstand APA, along with the thinnest hand-tossed pizza I have ever seen. It had already been a long day but I took solace from the fact the route home would go through familiar territory. Surely this final leg would be uneventful?

And it was, until I reached the west side of TO. With Weston Road (my exit when I'm coming from the west) in sight I decided (for reasons unknown, even to me) to break out into song and I was bellowing out Hallelujah (the Leonard Cohen version) at the top of my lungs when I sailed past the Weston Road exit onto the collector lanes.

Damn, I declared. Double damn.

All right, no worries, I said to myself. I'll just get off at Highway 400 and take the Black Creek exit onto Jane Street.

And then I discovered that Black Creek/Jane Street is unavailable from the express lanes and I was now going north, which would have been fine if we still owned the cottage. But we didn't, having sold it 15 years ago, and I wanted to go home.

Finch it is, then. That's only a three-mile detour.

There was a tiny bright side, however. After I forced my way onto the gridlock that was Finch Avenue to crawl 50 metres to the first stoplight, I was able to make my south to Torbarrie Road, which is the secret way directly into my little neighbourhood. And as they only opened this route a few years ago - it was a dead-end for my entire upbringing - this was the first time I was able to use it.

Small victories, I guess. After any tough day we all need a little win to cap it off.

Especially when it was a St. Lawrence kind of day.