SOWERBY'S ROAD
Adventures of a driven mind
Twenty-five years of global travel produces a book full of colourful stories

The other night I couldn't sleep. I had arrived home around midnight after a 5-hour drive from Fredericton to Halifax and realized the coffee with milk I drank an hour earlier was a mistake.

It wasn't just the coffee that was causing my brain to flip through thoughts like an anxious Rolodex. I had just finished the last edit on the last chapter of a book we have been working on throughout the summer and couldn't let go of it.

Laying there, I suspected Mike Doyle, trusted friend and graphic designer extraordinaire, was still in front of a computer at his studio in Fredericton. With more than 400 colour images and maps to support the 50 road stories that make up Sowerby's Road … Adventures of a Driven Mind, his brain was probably more scrambled than was mine.

Sleep was out of the question so I drove to our shop under a high-rise apartment building where eight members of my eclectic fleet of 11 vehicles hang out.

I dusted off the 1988 GMC Sierra that Tim Cahill and I set a new Pan-American speed record with back in 1987. The extended-cab pickup truck had looked a little trashed when we finished that 23-day, 23,000-kilometre trek. But under the glow of the shop lights, it looked as solid as when I drove it out of the Oshawa assembly plant 16 years ago.

Sitting in that Sierra truck was also a prime time to reflect on the years that have slipped by since I quit my job to take a shot at the around-the-world driving record.

In the fall of 1977, I picked up my old college buddy, Ken Langley, at his Ottawa apartment in my silver BMW 2002 tii. Ken had a week off from his job as an executive assistant for a Member of Parliament and I had taken leave from my position as a captain in the Canadian Forces.

We were both excited about the impending overnight road trip from Ottawa to Nova Scotia where we would visit family, party with friends and perhaps even run into an old flame. Ken and I were both single, had challenging jobs and liked to travel.

As the sun set over the Ottawa River, the last thing I expected from the all-nighter was the twist of fate that would throw my life into a 25-year journey of proportions I could never have imagined.

Rolling into Halifax the next afternoon Ken and I were deep into the concept of the ultimate road trip - to drive around the world faster than anyone had ever driven before. We would have to quit our jobs, set up a company to raise corporate sponsorship and maintain faith in our abilities to take on a task that would eventually propel us onto the front cover of the Guinness Book of World Records.

The success of that 74-day trip through 18 countries on five continents delighted our sponsors and calmed our friends and relatives. Everyone we knew shared our jubilation, except the bankers holding loans for the $110,000 shortfall on our $400,000 drive into the record books.

We were left with three choices: Go bankrupt, get jobs and pay off the debt or develop another adventure that might furnish us the financial ability to pacify the jittery bankers.

Adventure prevailed and in 1984 we went on to set a new speed record for the fastest drive from Cape Agulhas, South Africa to the northern tip of Europe at North Cape, Norway. We returned home to a hero's welcome with nine bullet holes in our GMC Suburban from an ambush in Kenya, tales of a daring transit through the Iran-Iraq war and advertising contracts with enough dollar signs attached to wipe out our lingering debt.

In 1985 Ken went back to law and I was left at a crossroads. Get a 'real job' or take on the last of the three internationally recognized long-distance driving records, the Pan American Challenge. The lure of the Challenge outweighed risk and responsibility and in 1987 Montana writer Tim Cahill and I halved the existing speed record from the bottom to the top of the Americas.

At the end of that quest I was firmly entrenched in the world of driving adventures and have since been on the forefront of another 60 driving events of varying scope and purpose. I have, with the help of countless people and organizations, managed to have my cake and eat it too by operating with a few basic rules: Do what you say you will do; nothing is free; and not much is easy.

But it is easy to find our book Sowerby's Road … Adventures of a Driven Mind, a collection of 50 stories over 25 years of global travel and road tripping adventures. Find it at www.sowerbysroad.com or drop Lisa or I an e-mail at odyssey and we'll steer you in the right direction.