Jill Murray

La S and I took a roadtrip to Montreal a couple of weeks ago. We took almost no photos during our time there, electing instead to use up our memory cards and batteries on the exciting, exciting highway on the trip back.

If you’ve never driven between Toronto and Montreal, you might be tempted to say things like “oh, I love highway driving, I can just sit and watch the landscape change for hours… blah blah blah… mesmerising… etc, etc.”

But if you’ve done that drive, especially if you’ve done it a lot, you’ll know that in addition to being quick and straightforward, it’s about as exciting as this all the way there:

The vegetation and terrain do not visibly change. You’d need to drive to Ottawa or fly out of the Island airport to observe that detail.

There is the Big Apple:

And there’s a little of this between Toronto and Oshawa:

But it passes quickly, and doesn’t even come close to matching the horror of the Mordor hellscape you can gawk at if you head off towards Hamilton instead.

Somewhere between Kingston and Belleville, I tired of taking photos of La S eating TimBits: (She bought the teeny little box, so it could only last so long anyway.)

That’s when I discovered my new favourite highway passtime: Split Screen Abstrucktion: In which one tries to take a picture of one truck or landscape from two angles at the same time, with the help of the passenger-side rearview mirror:

I think these early results are encouraging. And goodness knows, I really don’t need much encouraging.

I like the turquoise abstruck the best.