One Sunday a party of
four made a quick run from Detroit to Simcoe, in a new automachine.
Mr. George White had sold an
E.M.F. car to Mr. J. Harry Lea, formerly of Chicago but now coming to
Woodhouse to live, and these gentlemen, accompanied by Mrs. White and
Mr. Frank Ryerse, went up to personally steer the purchase home.
They left Windsor at 6.15 in the
morning, and ran the first fifty miles without meeting a soul. It was
too early for souls to be out.
Another twenty-five miles, and the
enormous appetites developed by a spin in the crisp morning air induced
them to stop at Blenheim for breakfast. Blenheim is a serene little
no-license town, and they were all painfully sober when they tore
themselves away from it.
Sixty-five miles down the line
they got desperately hungry, and as it began to be St. Thomas they
halted and ate four big dinners. The sky had threatened rain, but took
no active steps to round up any down-pours. A further thirty-five miles
of joying, and Tillsonburg was reached, where the party rested for an
hour and a half, and reviewed the trip so far with considerable
satisfaction.
True, it had been uneventful. They hadn't scared any
horses, and they had only run over one person, and that was a goose, and
they wouldn't have had the luck to do that, had it not been for the
happy tendency of geese and hens and such feathered stuff to cut across
the bows of vehicles that venture to contest the right of way with
them. So Goose received the blow on a small but highly essential segment of her anatomy, to wit, her neck, and became an also-ran.
At Tillsonburg the party was
augmented by Mrs. Lea and daughter, and they took the road on the
last lap into Simcoe, which was twenty-five miles. The car discharged its
[occupants] at six o'clock, after a run of 200 miles without a hitch
(there's no hitching to a horseless hook wagon), having averaged
twenty miles an hour.
