Day 2: Great Falls, MT to Onoway, AB

Turns out internet connection is sparse up in the far north so this blogging thing might not work out as I thought. I will continue writing them and might just have to post once we get to Homer. Anyways...

After the pup and us slept a solid 9 hours, we were up and ready to get to Canada! We had purposely made today a somewhat short driving day just in case it took a while to get through the border. I had read and read about what you could and couldn’t take to Canada so we scarfed all of our fruit and meat and I was mentally preparing to potentially toss our house plants, bottles of homemade mead and go through our entire trailer. All this worry was unnecessary as the border guard only asked us for our passports, where we were from, and where we going. I tried to show him Hank’s extensive paperwork I had worked so hard to get from the vet but he just said he’d take our word for it and told us to have a nice drive. To top it off, we were the only car at the border so it took all of 60 seconds or less.

With all that extra time, we decided we could make some stops at the next main town of Lethbridge. We got our first taste of the Canadian Super-Friendliness at the visitor center and bank. We learned that Lethbridge was founded when people began making “whiskey” in the late 1800’s out of river water, pure alcohol, chewing tobacco, and lye for flavor. Yum, too bad we didn’t find any samples. Because of the unruliness of the whiskey trade, the Northwest Mounted Police got their start who would later become the well-known Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Unfortunately the U.S. dollar is weak ($.96 US to $1.00 CA) but they were at least very friendly about it as exchanged us our greenbacks for some very colorful pictures of the Queen and hockey players. We found an off-leash dog park with lots of rolling hills and trails, which made Hank very happy. It is clear he is a very domesticated dog as he had acres of grassy fields to run in and he chose to trot right next to us on the trail, never letting more than 10 ft get between us.

 Happy trails for Hank

The bridge of Lethbridge

Another fun stop we had was in a tiny town called Nanton (pop. 2,124). Nanton is home to Canada’s largest garden railway which we had to at least investigate for Grant’s mom. We figured we shouldn’t leave poor Hank in the car for too long so we decided to forego the garden but the store itself was impressive with countless different miniature train cars and buildings. Across the street is the Museum of Miniatures and a large airplane museum. If this town had been in the U.S., I’m sure my family would’ve been here at least once a year for my brother, Tyler’s, sake. (Who, by the way, gets to start designing airplanes for Boeing starting on Friday! Go Tyler!)

After Nanton, we got back in hard-core-road-trip mode and took in the sites of Calgary from the car. We ran into a very strong thunderstorm during the one time of the day Katie decided to drive (I also got the construction zone yesterday). Since the rain was so heavy and we were hitting Edmonton about rush-hour, we took the Devonian Bypass around Edmonton and headed towards Onoway to find a campground. We had some difficulty finding the campground we were planning on stopping at as it was about 10 miles past where the Milepost said it would be but this allowed time for the rain to stop.  We were thrilled when Lessard Lake Campground turned out to look like this…….

(Imagine really beautiful lake with sun shining on it and forest all around).

And it didn’t rain a drop.

We forced ourselves to go to bed while it was still light out at 9:30 which felt very strange but since is was a bit chilly (haven’t said that in 3+ months!) and we were exhausted, was not very difficult. We had a little fighting with Hank over who would get the sleeping pads but were able to compromise by letting him sleep between us while we got the pads to ourselves. Rough life he has. 1,300 miles down, 2,120 to go!