Adventure to Canada

In one of my insomnia filled nights this winter, I was thinking of how I wanted to travel to a foreign country and get stamps on my passport.  Then DUH...I live just hours from Canada (no, Scott, I don't live IN Canada...just near it).  That morning I told Travis I wanted a weekend trip this summer to Canada.  Then I thought "I wonder if Andrew has geocached in Canada" and asked him at work that day.  He had not, and trip was contrived.

We had so much fun planning - Andrew pulled geocaches (for more information on geocaching click here), created a kick ass iPod playlist.  Travis memorized our route (like all good hunters do), I found hotels and stalked my weather app.  Andrew was smart and thought to check out cell phone use in Canada - phone and text was fine, but data.  GULP.  And for those of us that LIVE on the phones using data, this could be a costly trip. I just decided to leave my phone home so I couldn't even be tempted.  We had their phones in case of emergency and we had OnStar (which, like XM radio, works awesome in Canada!)  Imagine my angst when I walked out the door without my phone - and for three whole days!  As you can see, I survived.

Andrew and I picked up Travis from being at a golf tournament all day - and that means one thing: an interesting start to our trip.  Travis was a little tipsy, evident by the drunk dialing that he was doing.  He called Patrick at work and said, "Hhhhiiiii.  How's your day?" in a really sweet voice.  Andrew said, "Next thing he'll say is "whatcha wearin'?".  That became the joke of the trip.  We teased Travis endlessly.  And took away his phone.

We are such smart-assess.  At the border, the officer asked, "Where are you from?"  We politely said, "Missoula, MT" but carried on for entirely too long about what we could have said to land us in Border Patrol jail, laughing in between each one:

"Uh.  Over there." (pointing behind us)
"South"
"Mom & Dad...do we really need to have this conversation?"
"The sign says Montana "(pointing to Montana sign as shown below)

The first thing we noticed while driving in this beautiful country, was gas being only $1.20/gallon!  But we thought that was from old, dated signs since early in our drive the towns were right out of the 80s.  Remember this gem?



Paint scraped off of the buildings, ancient cars and appliances in yards.  But we kept seeing the price.  Wow.  How lucky are we?!  Cheap gas for the Tahoe?  We'll take it!

The street signs humored us, too.  There was this one sign that we saw everywhere:

I thought over and over "what does that sign mean?", but since we saw wild animal crossing signs (and no wild animals), logging truck crossing signs (and no logging trucks), I thought it was just another made up sign.  We called it the boobs sign.

Then on Saturday, I said.  "Crimeny.  What does that sign MEAN?" as our vehicle ka-boomed and shook us all around.  Oh.  Okay.  I get it.  BUMP in the road!!  The one thing that is so consistent in that part of the country, all of the signs had NO words.  Only graphics.  Which is good in some cases.  But you know how here we have, "gas, food, lodging, etc." on the exit signs?  Well, they have that too, but all in symbols.  And if there are more than about 4-5 symbols, you can't see all that is available.  And with no Internet for research, these little symbols became very important.  I guess it's what you are used to.  We can read many words in a row...maybe they can understand those symbols as they drive down the road!

Speaking of driving down the road.  Here are your quintessential inside-the-car photos:

Here is Andrew as our chauffeur.  He may or may not be singing.

I am very proud of how this one turned out. My self-portraits never look good!

We drove as far as we could that first day - to get us as close as we could to Banff National Park without the extra cost of actually staying at the park.  We spent our first night in Invermere, BC.  When we woke up that morning, Andrew said, "Gas is sold in liters here. Not gallons."  He must have had some brilliance in the middle of the night and shattered our cheap gas dreams. But still worth every penny. :^)

To be continued....