Day Four

I woke up earlier than I had hoped this morning, but I did get a much better night’s sleep than I had been getting. I figured it was about 6:30, but it was before 6. I tried to go back to sleep and be quiet, but Eric heard me and woke up around 6. That gave us some time to check email and chat before we got the kids up. After the stressful few days it was nice to have some time to relax. It was in the mid-50s out and it almost felt chilly. After we packed up and did dishes we filled with propane at the local wholesale ranchers supply. They were very helpful and it was only $2/gal. Then we headed west on Hwy 2. There were lots of hills and we were steadily climbing, so there was some slow going. We have to get used to that as we are heading west and into the mountains. We got gas and I was able to take the kids to a park nearby for a few minutes. We had the darkest looking rain cloud heading our way, but it never rained on us.We’ve seen patches of rain across the plains all afternoon, but we haven’t gotten more than enough rain to smear the bugs on the window. We jumped onto I-15 North and headed about 35 miles north to Canada. The wait reported online was less than 10 min wait and I’d say it took us about 9.5 mins to get through. Lots of questions about where we are from, where we are employed, where we are going and why. They ran our passports through and we were free to go. I tried to get a post on the blog and Facebook before going over the border, but my phone registered roaming (Canada) a good mile before the border station. I think the post went through to the blog but not FB. We were stressed from going through the border and forgetting to ask for a stamp, so we missed the photo op at the ‘Welcome to Alberta’ sign. No Fair~ we needed to force the kids to take a pic in from the sign and yell at them to smile just as our parents did when we were on family vacations as kids. LOL!

We stopped in the parking lot of the MacLeod visitor center to eat dinner. Eric made some YUMMY grilled cheese sandwiches. There was no play area, so the kids were mostly inside. They love to wrestle and goof around on our bed in back. No yelling tonight…we stopped a little earlier and the kids were a little more helpful. Jake, Dori, & I walked across the parking lot get cash out of the ATM. We were a little freaked out at first by the CDN dollars. Why is money from other countries so interesting??

Our goal is to make it to the north side of Calgary as we don’t want to hit any traffic in the morning. Right now we are about 30 miles south of Calgary. We had hoped to stop by 8:30 (12 hr day), but it’s looking more like 9pm. The sun is to our left, so Eric feels like he can keep going. I’ll finish this post later.

We made it to Carstairs, which means we drove 539 miles. It was a 12.5 hour day. Eric said he could go further, but it was time to stop. The kids needed some time to run around and Eric and I got a 30+ min walk in. We made a vlog entry on our walk which is pretty funny. We hope to upload both tomorrow when we have some WiFi.

Pic taken at 10:30pm