We're on the road!

We finally left home about 1:00 pm on Thursday, Feb 9th, 2017, and immediately got stuck in a snow pile left by shoveling alongside the house.  John had to shovel and gravel under the wheels of the truck and trailer so we could be on our way.  John likes to say: "I didn't get stuck getting the trailer out of the driveway; I got stuck picking Dawn up..."

The wind was horrendous south of Calgary.  Gas mileage on the truck was among the lowest we've seen in our travels. The cats did NOT want anything to do with kitty walks. We stopped to refuel at Fort McLeod and clipped the gas pump trying to get out of there. Oops. John gave them our contact info and we were back on the road. The cat walk and dinner stop planned for Milk River was aborted due to gale force winds and treacherously icy streets and sidewalks. Consequently, we surrendered all our dinner vegetables at the U.S. border about half an hour later.  The wind continued for a couple of hours as we progressed south in Montana, but disappeared for the most part by the time we got to Great Falls.  We drove through the night, switching drivers about every 3 hours.  Roads were not great but ok.  Thank goodness for audio books!  We got into Twin Falls, ID about 8 am Friday.  We stopped at Costco parking lot (the store was not open yet) for a cat walk and breakfast (which was Minestrone soup as that sounded better than cereal!) :)  The trailer is COLD.

We headed south from Twin Falls, but didn't get very far.  Highway 93 was closed from Jackpot (Idaho-Nevada border) to Wells, NV due to a dam burst and mud slides/flooding. Okay then!  Back we went, and headed west from Twin Falls this time, towards Boise, then south into Oregon, and stopped about 3 pm for the day at Jordan Valley.  We found an RV park that was: open, had running water and electrical.  That was the whole list so we parked!  John filled the trailer with water, checked the lines, connected the electrical and we ran all our portable heaters and the furnace to warm the trailer up more quickly.  The cats actually went outside finally because there is hardly any snow here, and despite that it was only about 9 deg C outside, there is no wind (and did I mention no snow!).

We walked main street (which took about 10 minutes) and we found out there was a wedding here (could have been 2007 for all we knew, but the directional signs were still up) and the Western Family grocery store is no longer there, despite the building signage.  We found a Trading Post that had bananas and tomatoes, and a convenience store that had wine.  Good enough.  We made dinner, had a bottle of wine and went to bed at 8 pm.  We had been up almost 40 hours.