Okay, so I started this sitting in bed in the caravan and then continued whilst sitting around the campfire. Now close to a week after I left, I thought I should get around to finishing and posting it! The photos will have to wait though, they’re still with the camera, which is with Caroline and the kids. I fly down tomorrow night to drive them back up over the weekend.
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Here we are, in the USA. In Great Falls, Montana, actually, with a long way still to go.
I left work early on Friday so that we could get a nice early start, but of course great plans are never quite executed with the perfection that they are conceived and so it wasn’t until much later than anticipated that we finally managed to get ourselves away from Fort McMurray.
This time, the aim was to get out of the driveway and if possible, all the way to our overnight camp without incident. I was in two minds as to whether to fill the caravan tank with water and pay the price of towing it or wait until we arrived at our destination, but in the end decided that I’d take a bit with us, just to get us through the first night. It wasn’t until I had been filling it for a while that I noticed the trail of water down the driveway. That’s when I remembered that the valve on the low drain point of the water tank was broken … hmm seems like that wasn’t quite going to go to plan. I took a look and decided that it wouldn’t be too hard to fix so we left home sans water and decided to fix it at some later point.
From there, the only thing providing minor hiccups to the plan was the cough that Michael had been living with for the days leading up to our departure. I had spread to Sam and wasn’t far off infecting Emily and Thomas as well, which means that we travelled most of the way to a chorus of hacking coughs and wheezing throats. I fully expected to get my turn around about the time that we stop driving and sit down to enjoy the holiday.
We over-nighted in the tiny town of killam and woke up to the sound of rain pattering away on the caravan roof and the solid roof that covers up our little extendable sleeping box (it will make sense when you see the pictures). And at that point I think Caroline and I were both more than happy to smile and enjoy the fact that we’d upgraded from the tent trailer and wouldn’t have to worry about wet canvas. And so it was that we set out for day two of the adventure, happy with progress.
As I drove, towing a large, loaded caravan behind me for the first time, I couldn’t help but keep one eye on the fuel consumption, noting the fact that I was making a considerably larger donation back to the industry that supports my employment than we used to have to make with the tent trailer, the needle all but visibly drooping under the rapid draining of the fuel tank. Ahh, the price of comfort.
The target for the day was to successfully negotiate the border crossing and try and get down to Great Falls (which we obviously succeeded at). We managed to get away nice and early and even kept the kids entertained with a ‘treasure hunt’; something Caroline came up with to entertain the kids and even get them to tear their gaze away from the screens and look out the windows. It’s really like scenic bingo. You have to find all the things on the list that the instigator comes up with. It was significantly more successful that eye-spy, a game which at the time seems like a great idea, but which quickly wears out its welcome and deteriorates into a series of protests, arguments and insults. After all, eye spy is particularly challenging with someone of Emily’s age, who is likely to start with “I spy with my little eye something that starts with A”. And of course the answer is ‘Elephant’. Go figure, wrong letter and you can’t see the bloody thing anyway. As long as you don’t apply logic, or open your eyes, you have a chance.
Now whilst the treasure hunt game started out well, as Caroline read out her list, I started to have my doubts. These were things that we were supposed to see from the car. When she got to goat, chicken and more importantly, bear, I believe I expressed my disdain. After all, I don’t ever recall having seen a chicken from the car here and we’ve even only spotted one bear.
But unbeknownst to me at the time was how flexible she was prepared to be with the rules. Who would have thought that the KFC we were eating for lunch would qualify as the chicken, or that she’d accept a picture of a bear in a newspaper for that animal. Not the way I would have run the game, but hey, it worked. Funnily enough, I think by the end of the trip we had actually managed to cross off everything on her list, though having started well, we went for hundreds of kilometres past many many paddocks full of horses without seeing a foal. In the end we even saw the elusive goat (and no, it wasn’t me).
After stopping to pick up some hardware to repair the water tank valve in Great Falls, we made it to West Yellowstone on the edge of the park around lunchtime and did some over-priced grocery shopping, stocking the pantry for the days ahead and then set out to enjoy the marvelous scenery on our way to our camping location at Grant Village. We had hoped to be there by mid afternoon, but the further we travelled, the further our destination seemed to be from us. With mountains, the continental divide and seemingly ever decreasing speed restrictions to deal with, it seemed like every time I estimated how long there was to go, it was the same. At least the scenery was varied and eventually we made it.
While Caroline checked us into the park and arranged permits (you need a permit to fish, a permit to paddle a kayak … I’m surprised you didn’t need one to use the air!), I crawled around under the van and fixed our valve problem in the carpark so that we could fill the tank before we headed down to our site. It turned out to be a magic spot with a view through the trees across Lake Yellowstone. A campfire followed over which we cooked our dinner before hitting the sack.
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