Do you remember our roadtrip in 2001? The one that we arranged when I found the supposedly exact address for Amytiville’s famous haunted house.

Arranged being a big word… If my memory is good, the conversation resembled this;

• Hey, I found the Amityville house’s address!
• Really?? We should go…
• We should, indeed!
• How about next week end?

And everything was about settled. I jumped in my 1998 baby blue Volswagen Fox. I lived in Québec City back then, and you in Sherbrooke. It would have been simpler just to drive to your place, but I had done a pit stop in Trois-Rivières for some reason, and you had joined me there..

So we hit the road together, and started on our way South to the states. GPS weren’t a big thing back then, or maybe they were, but I didn’t have one… We had printed Google’s advice as to how to get there and everything went well, until we hit the U.S. border. The custom guy came to my window…

• Where are you from?
• I am from Québec City, he is from Sherbrooke, and we’re currently coming from Trois-Rivières…

Custom guy rolling his eyes…

• Where are you going?
• Amityville, New York! (can’t go wrong… perfectly normal answer)

Eyes rolling again…

• Why are taking this route then?

Happened that we were in Jackman, Maine… If I was nice, I’d put a map…. Ok, here’s a map:

 

So, normally, the paths in red or blue would have been pretty optimal. But somehow, Google decided it would be nicer for us to go through Maine, and we ended up at Jackman’s border control station, which, by all means, would not have been the first pick for any other traveler. (green path)

• Because Google told me so?!…

Handing my pile of Google advices about where to turn right and where to turn left… I think he must have decided I looked too stupid to be dangerous, because he let us in.

I remember we rode a looooooong time on a freshly rebuilt part of road, and every now and then there was a sign “Don’t pass”. We both spoke pretty good English, but the only meaning I could see for “Don’t pass” at the moment, was when you’re not supposed to pass there… Not supposed to take that road, you know, and we had seen NO other car for many many miles. Many miles. I had a mild fright of being arrested by American cops… My fantasyland has nothing for uniforms, and I had watched “Cops” on tv once or twice! Those policemen were scary!

I was so relieved when you figured it meant not to pass, as in “ne pas dépasser” in French…

We rode, and rode and finally arrived in Amityville in the middle of the night. We were pretty excited to be so close to the evil house of all evil houses, so we decided to go find the address and then find a place for the night, or what was left of it.

We parked in front of the house, and I got very intense chills when I noticed the time on the dashboard clock. 3h15 AM.

For those not familiar with the Amityville story, 3h15 is the precise time the devil possessed father of the family, George Lutz, always woke up, and bad things happened. So I watched you go run around on the front yard, while I cowardly stayed locked in the car, incapable to go closer to the house.

You eventually got tired of the running around, it was almost 4 o’clock and we had no place to sleep. So we went in town and found ourselves a nice motel (obviously the kind people never spent more than an hour or two at) and got a few hours of much needed sleep.

I didn’t keep much memories of that motel, but I remember we weren’t sorry to leave it in the early morning.

We had to go back to the house, because I wanted to see it in the daylight, and take some pictures… When we parked and got out of the car, I noticed that the fright I had gotten the night before was gone.

A car drove by us, and young men shouted ghost-like sounds our direction… I wouldn’t have thought that after all these years, enough people still came to check out the house to provoke that kind of reaction from the locals.

We took some pictures, selfies that weren’t, really. (the term came up on the Internets only the next year…. Thanks Wiki! If you say so, it must be true!) And then there was not much left to do.

Veni vidi vici, you could say! So we needed to come up with a new plan…

• We should stop in Manhattan, it is almost on the way back!

You always had good ideas… But now, we didn’t have Google Maps’ help anymore, because we had directions from Trois-Rivières to Amytiville and back, not for a detour via the Big Apple!

A: Amityville        B:Manhattan   …..   Obviously!

We stopped in a garage, bought a state map, and we hit the highway… We thought it couldn’t be that hard to find Manhattan, and I drove as you tried to figure the best way to get there. We were in a pretty good mood… But not for long.

I discovered that even if you were incredibly intelligent, and full of qualities, good co-piloting wasn’t one of them. Your informations always came at the last minute…

• Turn here… Ohhhh We had to turn there….

Number of times, we had to find ways to recalculate our itinerary. At one point, on a 4 or 5 lanes highway, you gave me the cue to take an exit way too late, and the pressure cooker blew up! We were stuck in traffic, it was dang hot, and we had to find another way not to lose ourselves and end up never going back to Canada!

I NEVER scream. Not when I am over-happy, not when I am mad, not even when I am scared to death. But that afternoon, I would have paid to hear what the people in the cars around us thought, at the sight of those two silly young French Canadians, screaming at the top of their lungs, arguing about a highway exit and the lack of co-driving skills of the young man.

I took the next exit, and we switched seats to prevent in-car ultimate fighting.

We got to the Big Apple safe and sound, and we found a parking that looked semi-safe. Not that my Fox was particularly foxy, but I liked it, and I liked the fact that it took me from A to B without much trouble for its age… And New York was going to be “A” soon!

After paying our fee, we headed for a fun day in the heart of the city…

(to be continued…)