There and Back Again... and There Again

First off, I’d like to offer a humble apology to all of my avid readers (who?) for my prolonged absence. In my defence, a Big Life Event™ got in the way. I’ll start this update by describing the BLE and then get sidetracked by a completely unecessary story of sentimentality, daring and hubris. Enjoy!

Big Life Event

So what’s new? In a breathtaking display of comic timing and self-preservation, I and my fiancée both moved to the USA to start postdoctoral academic jobs… in June 2025. More specifically, I’m now a postdoctoral research fellow at the new(ish) Institute for Mechanobiology at Northeastern University in Boston, where I can keep messing around with hips for a couple of joints. Maybe I could even peek at other joints too!

As an aside, this website and my Mastodon instance went down for a “planned server migration” in late May, as the Raspberry Pi they’re hosted on needed to physically migrate across the continent with us. The downtime ended up being a lot longer than expected due to Internet shenanigans, but that’s a story for another day.

When I moved to Canada in 2019, I made do with just two suitcases of stuff—this time it was a different story. All through May we were desperately selling, gifting and generally uprooting six-and-a-half years of combined belongings. It was an absolute bloodbath, but there was one cherished posession I couldn’t let go of.

Silly little car

It’s this thing:

Yes, I am the proud and often frustrated owner of this 1795 MG Midget, imaginatively named “Blue”. I bought it for somewhere around C$3000 in April 2019. Hindsight tells me that this was a very silly and financially unsound thing to do, but I’m not listening.

I didn’t really want to go through the whole ordeal of importing and registering a car in Massachusetts, nor did I want to brave the Mad Max world of Boston’s roads in Blue.¹ The sensible thing to do would of course be to sell it in Vancouver, but how could I? This car had gone to Yellowstone and back with me! It was a surprisingly efficient ski carrier! It was 50 years old this year! You wouldn’t sell a car on its 50th birthday, would you?

With this totally-not-sentimental reasoning backing me up, it was time for a plan.

The plan

Given that I still own two cars back in the UK,² it made sense to send Blue back to the country of its birth to join its silly little car brethren. But how? The ideal option would be to ship it roll-on, roll-off (RORO, like a ferry) from somewhere near Vancouver—but the only nearby RORO terminal is in Tacoma. I was warned by the shipping company that Americans can get a bit iffy about shipping a Canadian-registered car.

Alternatively, I could ship in a container from Vancouver (much more expensive) or do a Canadian RORO from… Halifax! A mere four time zones away. But given that we were moving to Boston anyway, this didn’t seem so ludicrous. Slowly, a plan began to form:

• Fill Blue with heavy and airline-unfriendly personal items (like my guitar, for example).
• Then leave Blue to stay at a friend’s for a bit, while…
• I and the soon-to-be-missus fly to Boston with two suitcases each. Try not to be detained at the border.
• Get settled in for a couple of weeks.
• Then (just me) fly back to Vancouver to pick Blue up, and drive it across North America for a week to drop off the goods.
• Finally, continue on to Halifax and send it on its way, before one last flight back to Boston.
• Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over.

Simple, right? Aside from releasing the particulate emissions of a small country and involving far too many border crossings, what could possibly go wrong? Oh, and it just needed to not rain at all, thank you very much—my wipers have been intermittent at best for this whole year.

The reality

Things started off well enough. The initial move was smooth, including a long enough layover in SF that we could nip out and gawk at the Golden Gate Bridge. Border officials were all pleasant—maybe they didn’t get the executive memos? We timed everything so well that we arrived at our new home not half an hour before our barebones selection of pre-ordered IKEA furniture.

Cutting through two weeks of finding our feet in an apartment heady with fresh wall paint, it was time for me to fly back again and begin the titanic drive across Canada. Hopefully I’d actually reach my destination, unlike the ship.

Boy, was that drive a slog, for me and Blue equally. We each developed our own coping mechanisms. I was sustained by Mike Duncan’s excellent podcasts (the latter third of the History of Rome, and all of the French Revolution). I honestly think I’d have become braindead somewhere near Winnipeg without that mental stimulation. Blue, on the other hand, was sustained by two whole gallons of engine oil top-ups.³

On the first morning we were struck with some very heavy showers before making it to Hope, BC. At the end of the last one the wipers gave up for the last time, and from then on I just had to hope (heh, heh) that no more rain would come. But it didn’t! And for the next few days it was smooth sailing, stopping in Creston, Gull Lake, Winnipeg, and Thunder Bay.

Highway level crossings! You’re merrily cruising along the Trans-Canada at 100km/h (faster than that gets a bit rattly) and suddenly see this little sign:

Before you know it—with no change in speed limit—you’re crashing over a railway level crossing!

This example is actually on the ring road around Winnipeg, not an insignificant city. Make it make sense.

Intermission: big animals

The reality, part II

Thunder Bay was where the problems really began. I’d noticed the engine coughing a bit going up some of the mountain passes back in BC, but hadn’t thought of it much in the long, flat prairie. The cough started creeping in again though as I skirted the coast of Lake Superior.

I was laying eggs trying to work out what was wrong. I was getting misfires (and eventually backfires), but only above about 2500 RPM. Was it an ignition issue? Carburettor? After getting worse past Wawa, I feverishly spent the evening in my motel in Sudbury, ON⁴ searching mgexp.com for potential quick fixes.

Most of the men in sheds suggested the use of a full garage and a parts car, but I was just over halfway across Canada and on a time crunch! The panic peaked when I was trying to check my spark plugs and one of the spark leads broke in two. You try finding a replacement spark lead for an MG Midget in Sturgeon Falls! But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and a jerry-rigged abomination carried me all the way to Boston:

Image of my spark lead fix has been redacted as dangerous to the reader’s health.

This, unsurprisingly, did not fix my misfiring problem. But what could I do but continue spluttering across Ontario? Somehow I made it to Cornwall that evening, just across the border from New York State. I’d cross over in the morning and it should only be a short 5 hours to Boston, as long as there weren’t too many hills and it wasn’t too hot.

But wait! The next day was the 24th June, 2025, only the hottest day of the year. And of course, Vermont and New Hampshire aren’t exactly famous for their flat plains. Needless to say, Blue was not happy. By 5pm we were crawling forwards about 10 miles at a time before overheating and peeing all over the road.

But we made it in the end! This turned out to be a premature but temporary end to the trip—I couldn’t fix things fast enough to make the shipping date in Halifax three days later—and I ended up patching things up for a few weeks before finally making the drive. Perhaps I’ll write up a short addendum about that little trip, but arriving in Boston feels more like an appropriate conclusion. The rest is just happily ever after.

So that’s about it! Me and my fiancée are safely in Boston and Blue is safely in England. Perhaps one day we’ll move across the Atlantic (with the way things are here this might not be by choice) and maybe by then I’ll have the means to get my own shed for my fleet of silly little cars. I can but dream.