July 2nd, 2009
Hi Ho everyone, we have completed day 1 of our “Excellent Adventure” (Ross is Ted and I’m Bob) and we are sitting in the Lethbridge Casino parking lot. We ate a great supper (Ross had a steak and I had a seafood croissant) and Ross won $68.00 gambling! We are going to use some of it for breakfast tomorrow and I guess we will try to win some more. (It’s a tough life)
We had a bit of a problem this morning, we left Sherwood Park at about 10:30 am and about half way to Red Deer we stopped and felt the tires on the trailer and they were way too hot. The trailer manufacturer is in Red Deer so we stopped in and found out that the tires on the trailer were good, but they weren’t radials! So we now have 4 new tires (they are a lot bigger than the ones that were on it) and Ross said the trailer pulls much better now. We left Red Deer at about 3:30 pm and pulled into Lethbridge at about 8:00pm.
The weather has been great, sunny most of the morning and the afternoon and cloudy the rest of the time. We both agreed that we couldn’t have had better weather on day 1. We are going to cross the border tomorrow, so we’ll see if they let us in with all our possessions (they might think that we are trying to sneak into their country)! Yeah, right, like we would stay in the states when we have a house waiting in paradise! I got all our documentation out in anticipation of our crossing, Ross thinks it might be busy cause of July 4th. I guess we will have to see.
Oh yeah, while we were in the casino, Ross phoned an old buddy of his that he hasn’t seen for more than 30 years (he played in a band called Wizard with Ross), his name is Doug Freeman (bass player) so we planned for him to meet us here in the parking lot of the casino!
Talk to you soon!
July 3rd, 2009
It was so cool, we stayed in the casino parking lot last night and woke up at about 8:30 am and thought we would have a cheap breakfast at the casino. We walked up to the casino and found out it doesn’t open until 9:30, we had 10 minutes to wait so we just joined the few people in between the two sets of doors to wait. By the time 9:30 came there must have been at least 30 people waiting ( mostly older people), Ross and I both thought that there were sure a lot of die hard gamblers waiting for the doors to open. Once they were opened they all started running, again we thought they were running to find their favourite machine, but no, they were all running toward the restaurant, the breakfast was only $4.95. I guess this is how the seniors spend their mornings, waiting for cheap breakfasts, we guessed we were about to join them. You would be surprised that by the time we found a booth, all the tables were full and people were waiting for a table, wow!
We got out of Lethbridge without incident and were pleasantly surprised when the US border guards didn’t even inspect the RV, all Ross had to do was drive through a big building where they x-rayed the vehicle, we were stopped no more than 5 minutes, we are hoping the Mexican border will be the same.
While driving towards Butte Montana, we traveled through gorgeous mountain ranges and through a rain storm, there was a bit of lightning and thunder but not much. On some of the hills going up we ended up only going about 30 miles an hour, really slow. We found out that after the rainstorm our trailer lights started going funny. Ross would turn his left signal light on and his right one would flash, when he hit the brakes the back up camera came on even though it was switched off. We have unplugged the plug and we are hoping once it dries it will work properly. Getting the electrical checked on this beast will take forever! We have our fingers crossed that it will work in the morning.
Now we get to the fun part. Before we left home I had searched the internet looking for a couple of RV parks to help us out. When we were close to Butte, we plugged in the name of the RV Park we had decided on in the GPS and the RV Park we were looking at was actually on one of the choices on the GPS so we hit go. We followed the instructions and found it had directed us to a 2 lane road that looked like it went nowhere. Well it did, the paved road stopped and we ended up on a gravel road with nowhere to turn around, until we came upon a road that went on the diagonal. We tried to turn around there and ended up jackknifing the trailer, lucky for us there was a SUV waiting patiently for us, when we asked what was down the road farther she told us that there was a place to turn around up farther a bit. We headed down that way and finally got the rig turned around, in the mean time when we were talking with the lady in the SUV she told us that there were about 4 other people getting lost as the GPS didn’t have the right co-ordinates and she told us how to get to the RV Park. Earlier on in the day we had stopped at a gas station and bought some fireworks, the lady that sold them to us told us that Butte was a party town and we had decided that we might stay a couple of days since we thought it might be fun. We got turned around, found the RV Park (it’s yucky) and we are going to drive to Pocatello Idaho as planned! We stopped in too late for the people working in the office and on the door it said that they had wireless internet so we decided to stay, guess what, no internet, that’s why we are getting a few days of blog in one. Oh well, tomorrow is another day!
Talk to you soon
Ross and Kim
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