Winter is Coming Here?

This weekend coming up is Thanksgiving here in Canada, which for us, means an opportunity to flee the Mac in search of some fun somewhere else. We’ve elected to head down to Edmonton to get some pre-winter shopping in so that the kids are ready to head off to school through the cold and snow. We might just manage to take them to the water park at the West Edmonton Mall or sneak in a moving or something as well.

It was also going to be our last trip away in the caravan before we had to winterize it. Yes, in Canada, unlike back home, we don’t keep using the thing through the winter. There is in face a requirement to do a couple of things to prepare for abandoning your van from the months that the snow is on the ground (yeah, 6 of the bloody things at least!) It has something to do with the effects of below zero temperatures on water. If you happen to forget about it, you leave water in all your lines, the water pump, the water heater, the shower hose, the toilet piping … and of course water expands as it freezes. Not a good idea. So we have to put antifreeze through all of the lines.

We had planned to winterize at the end of our trip, but as I mentioned once before in this blog, fall doesn’t seem to last all that long here and the first flurries of snow actually came through Fort Mac yesterday. And for the rest of this week, we’re facing temperatures hovering around the freezing point. In fact when I clambered leapt gazelle-like from the bed this morning, it was at -5C. So before I left for work, panicking slightly due to the fact that we’d not yet drained any tanks or lines in the van, I turned on the taps and the water pump to have them eject a trickle of mushy water. Not good.

I had to leave it like that to go to work, but am fortunate enough to have a super star wife who during the day made her way underneath with a hair dryer to thaw the drain line so that she could get the tank to empty. What a trooper!

So now, the winterizing is mostly done (I’ll have to move the van to get the slide out to access the water heater when I get home) and we’ll just have to hope for improved driving conditions tomorrow on our way south and not use any water! Sounds like a hoot. At least they’re not predicting lots of snow over the weekend, just not very warm temperatures.