Morgan’s Wild and Wacky Adventures in Travel

I used to have a podcast on the iTunes store back in the early-days of podcasting. My podcast was called “The Traveling Man” and I used to recount my weekly travel adventures for about 20,000 devoted listeners. Unfortunately my travel schedule became too hectic to keep-up the podcast and it disappeared into Internet ether.

On my podcast I used to do a segment called “Morgan’s Wild and Wacky Adventures in Travel” – it was the reason many people listened to my podcast and was a blast to share some of my more exciting adventures.

On this blog I spend about 95% of my time writing about Domaining even though a good 50% of my life is spent traveling around the world. Since I want to keep this blog dynamic and exciting I thought I’d start sharing more of my travel adventures with you. Heck – there’s more to life than Domaining and my two passions in life are travel and domaining – in that order!

While this adventure hardly compares to being chased with a cane by a cab-driver in Hong Kong, it is nonetheless something I would have included in my podcast under the Wild and Wacky Adventures in Travel section so I thought it would be fun to share with all of you!

This weekend my girlfriend and I attended a wedding in Toronto. We borrowed her Mom’s car to get there – a 1999 Toyota Camry that has run like a champ for the last 11 years.

The wedding was a about thirty minutes away from Daina’s Mom’s house in a city called Guelph. We got to the wedding early and had a great time – it was a Scottish-Ukrainian wedding which was VERY cool and a combination I doubt many have seen. The groom wore a kilt and at one point they are both crowned – very cool especially since my family way back when immigrated to the US from the Ukraine!

After the wedding we headed back to Daina’s Mom’s house – we had about three hours before the reception. We hopped-onto the 401 (a major Ontario highway – like the 405 in LA) and started our way back.

Five-minutes into our drive we both hear a short hissing sound and then the check engine light came on followed by the oil light…followed by the car losing power steering, power brakes, oh and the engine stopped! At this point we are in the fast-lane and I realized we had about 10 seconds to get onto the shoulder before we were literally stopped in the middle of the busiest freeway in Toronto!

Luckily I managed to muscle the car over to the side of the road. I have a new appreciation for power brakes as I had to stomp on the brake as hard as I could to get us stopped.

We called CAA and spent about thirty minutes being blown-around like a windsock as trucks rushed past us. Looking back I’ll tell you if that happens again – I’m getting-out of the car.

Daina and I are both great at making the best of these situations so we grabbed the sandwiches we picked-up on the way back  and started enjoying our lunch. After about thirty minutes the tow-truck came and we made our way back to Daina’s Mom’s house.

It turns-out that something called a “timing belt” (I literally know absolutely nothing about cars) had snapped causing the engine to stop. In the end we were safe – the car is now in the shop and another wild and wacky adventure in travel comes to an end.

Of course – as you all know I’m obsessed with video so couldn’t imagine telling this story without letting all of you experience it first-hand. Watch the video below and you can join us as we sit on the side of the 401 waiting for our rescue.



Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton