MONTREAL — College friends Steve Bolan, Mark Cho and Doug Guinty reported yesterday after completing a road trip from Toronto to Montreal that taking on 700 kilometres of carefree highway would have been a lot better if they had not done it in an antique wooden stagecoach.
“When we started off on the 427 North, it was actually pretty much fine. It was a Friday at 5:30 PM, so speed wasn’t much of an issue, and I think the horses really enjoyed the relaxed pace,” said Guinty in an interview at the friends’ Montreal hotel room. “Someone put on “Life is a Highway,” we cracked some warm beers, and just started talking about where we’d been, and where we were going. We took turns holding this little piece of doweling between our teeth to keep from biting off our tongues because of the rattling of the stagecoach. It just felt really real.”
“If I had it to do again though, I’d do more research into wet firemaking and star-chart navigation beforehand. There is definitely not a place to charge your smartphone on a stagecoach. We checked.”
The group had hoped that the trip would be a great way to experience Canada. “We really wanted to take time to smell the roses, see this country mile by mile at eye level,” Bolan explained, before pausing to apply ointment to his snakebites.
Trouble hit the group the fifth night of their trip, when they’d made camp outside Collingwood, Ontario.
“It was just around sunset. At first, I didn’t know who those men with bandanas around their faces were,” Cho recounted nervously. “But then I was like…we’re sitting around the fire, we’re not armed, and there’s a $10,000 stagecoach next to us. And we forgot to lock it. I was like, oh shit, you don’t just leave a vehicle like that around and expect vagabond bandits not to try and nab it—it has gold leaf and tassels and everything–we barely escaped.”
However the bandits stole most of the group’s Gatorade and Pop Tart supply, and tragically, one of the original members, Richard Olsen, didn’t make it.
“I decided to just take the train instead,” said Olsen.
The courageous party finally had to abandon their stagecoach when they reached the St. Lawrence River, which had looked a lot smaller on Google image searches. “We gave each of the horses a lump of brown sugar and got them first-class passage back home. They deserve it,” Guinty explained. “When we finally set foot on that land on the other side, I’d never been prouder, except for the time earlier that day when I’d mended the spoke of the back left wheel with a stick and an old stove coil.”
At press time, the Collingwood Bandits have stolen two more head of cattle and a bag of gold.
