Wary of flying, Newfoundlanders undertake cross-country road trip to get home

When the writing was on the wall at his work site in Alberta, Andrew Ivany wanted to get home with the least amount of human contact possible.

So he drove.

"Just the risk I thought would be too great," he said of flying. "Not to mention, resources are pretty strained right now. The last thing they needed was someone else coming through."

Ivany and another Newfoundlander, Rocky Anstey, spent about 10 days quarantined at their job site at Sylvan Lake, near Red Deer, before going south to Calgary to buy a car and begin the trip home.

In Calgary, Ivany noticed things were far from normal. There was an edge in the air that he didn't like.

"I can just see social disarray around me. People arguing. Lineups, people standing too close together," he said. "It just seemed odd to me."

Heading east, they snaked their way across the country, staying above the U.S. border as they passed through Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.

When they reached Quebec, they ran into a strange scenario on a Canadian highway — a military checkpoint.

Soldiers in army fatigues stopped their vehicle and asked where they were heading. When they said they wanted to pass through Quebec to get home, the soldiers turned them back.

"It was surprising. It almost felt like I was in an episode of The X-Files," Ivany said.

The soldiers gave the travellers an alternate route instead, ordering them southward to the St. Lawrence instead of going through the centre of Quebec.

As they were leaving Quebec, they passed through another military checkpoint.

Once they reached northern New Brunswick, it was smooth sailing. The pair had no issues boarding the ferry in Nova Scotia and worked their way across the island.

"It didn't seem too congested there whatsoever," Ivany said. "The only thing we noticed were a lot of trucks."

Ivany is in isolation at a relative's cabin on the Avalon Peninsula to keep his family safe. He has no idea when he'll return to Alberta, where he's carved out a good living in the oil and gas sector for more than a decade.

Work is not top of mind these days.

"If anything is going to happen I'd rather be close [to family] than be away and alone. This disease isolates people in more way than one."

The trip also gave him perspective on what the country is going through with the COVID-19 crisis and how it could change the world.

"We were talking about it yesterday, how this is something we're going to remember. It's a pretty big event and this is going to change things," he said.

"People are obviously going to die. But what good is going to come out of this, who's really to say? But we all have that optimism together hoping something good is going to come out of this."

Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador