It’s the journey, not the destination

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/01/2010 (5975 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It has all the makings of a Judd Apatow buddy flick: Two 20-something slacker guys punt work and school for a big adventure — a canoe trip to New Orleans.

But the inexperienced duo leaves so late in the year that river levels are low. Their canoe frequently scrapes the river bottom and they have to hitch a ride in a truck to reach deeper water, where — wait for it — the canoe tips and they lose their camping gear and food.

Soaking wet and in the early stages of hypothermia, riding in an ambulance to hospital, Murray Jowett and Nick Turnbull reconsider the canoe component of their Big Adventure.

It was Halloween, Day 23 of their trip and they were stuck in Muscatine, Iowa.

"We knew we didn’t want to go home, but we had lost all of our camping gear," said Turnbull, 22.

"For the next two days we stayed in a hotel room and ate pizza," added Jowett, 21.

Turnbull and Jowett had begun their trip Sept. 15 on the banks of the Assiniboine River, underneath the Assiniboine Park footbridge. Friends and family came to see them off in the early morning, just as the sun was rising. They were brimming with confidence. They wanted to canoe all the way to New Orleans by Christmas. They were taking a guitar, violin and harmonicas, planning to busk in riverbank towns to earn money for food and hotel rooms.

It was indeed glorious until high winds in Muscatine grounded them for two days and, out of frustration, they made the fateful move across the river that wouldn’t let them cross.

The revelation came to them that Halloween night, eating pizzas and watching foreign films in a warm hotel room: A 30-day Greyhound pass could take them to places where the Mississippi never flowed. And, oh yeah, New Orleans too — eventually.

"We felt free all of a sudden," Turnbull explained. "We could go anywhere we wanted and we weren’t stuck on the river and the towns all along it."

"It was an unexpected, great change," Jowett said of boarding that bus for the first time.

The 20-minute dunk in the near-freezing Mississippi had damaged Turnbull’s guitar. So, bus pass in hand, the boys decided they’d make a detour to El Paso, Texas, where they’d look up a friend who fixes guitars.

"We just used that as an excuse to go to Texas," Jowett said. "It was a spontaneous decision made at 4 o’clock in the morning one night."

Over the next month, Jowett and Turnbull travelled through 18 states, going as far west as Arizona, cross-country to Key West, Fla. — where they spent four days lying on the beach — and then straight north on a 30-hour bus ride to New York City, where they bunked with Jowett’s uncle in Manhattan.

They did stop in New Orleans for three days — much before Christmas — and made it to Nashville, too. And Austin, and Flagstaff, Ariz.

In fact, the two young men said they had such a good time, they never did get the guitar fixed.

They continued to busk and a busking community embraced them wherever they went.

"All this way we were meeting people, they were inviting us into their homes and feeding us, the coolest people," Turnbull said.

When they busked, they planted little Canadian flags inside the opened guitar case and hung a large sign: Travelling from Canada, help us continue.

After two days in Manhattan, the duo bused to Montreal to stay with friends and then flew home; Jowett first, as Turnbull needed more time to sit and vegetate.

They were both home in time for Christmas.

Turnbull is now taking urban studies at the University of Winnipeg and Jowett has a part-time job at a daycare.

Their big adventure turned out to be grander than they could have imagined. Would they do it again?

"In a heartbeat," Jowett said.

"We’d like to, one day, who knows when, go to where we tipped in Iowa and finish (the canoe trip) on the Mississippi," Turnbull said.

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca