I wasn't sure if I'd ever "get my mojo back".

Maybe hitchhiking is dead. Maybe I'm too old for this. Maybe the chorus of people smugly waiting for me to see the light and stop traveling will finally be vindicated -- and I'll do what they say is inevitable.

Ha, but today was heaven. Felt like I slipped out of my own skin and reached back into some primeval state; like all that took me away from the road in the past few years hadn't happened at all.

Stood with my wife -- my wife! -- in Doyles, Newfoundland for six hours. Doyles is a crossroads with a gas station and a liquor store and that's about it. No one was going our way. Seemed as if we'd be stranded there a lifetime.

As we began to think of giving up, a Quebecois man rolled up in a brand-new Ford bus, his eyes said -- 'get the hell in!' And there is no breed of man more fearless than a Quebecer behind the wheel of a brand-new bus.

He pushed that 15-passenger behemoth 110kmh through zero-vis fog, passing everyone, passing tractor-trailers, tailgating the devil himself down terrifying rock-faced turns. He drove one-handed as if he couldn't care less. He was a bus salesman that did his own work -- drove every bus he sold out anywhere from Kenora, ON to St. John's, NL.

His driving was so insane I knelt down and prayed when we got to Corner Brook some 180km onward.

I live for this shit. This is everything I'm about. I'm back -- I'm 110% back.