10/12/07 Travel to Canada

Friday was a travel day. Sarah doesn’t like to travel and then stay a place for only one or two nights and then travel more. Consequently, she prefers longer travel days and then staying put. This fits with my original plan of moving the RV every 7-10 days, however we haven’t kept with that since we’ve been on a schedule to arrive at different places on specific dates.

So, I decided not to stay overnight for one night in Boise, just head on into Canada… Since I didn’t have internet and my mapping software at the last campsite, I didn’t really fathom how long of day of driving that would become. We left Kamiah at 10:00 am, did a beautiful drive with lots of fall color and arrived in Boise at 2:00 pm. Originally I thought I’d be in Coeur d'Alene at 12:30.

I had chosen a restaurant the Wolf Lodge Inn from the book “Eat Your Way Across the USA” from Demi. Dave and I were looking forward to a meal of barbeque cooked over tamarack and cherry wood with buckaroo beans, a twist of krebel (fried bread) and steak fries. Sarah would have to find something vegetarian to enjoy. Unfortunately, they didn’t serve lunch.

If this had been a movie, this would have been the foreshadowing moment where the music changes. We should have found a camp site and waited for dinner. Instead we went to a Red Lobster where Dave ordered all you can eat shrimp, we played with his new puzzle set and laughed at “Priest, Minister and Rabbi jokes.” When we set off for Canada it was 3:30.

I had instructions from Mel, but the signs were very clear directing us to the US/Canada border crossing, so we followed the road signs instead. (More scary music…) As we crossed over the last 25 miles to Canada on mountain roads, we were stopped by a road crew due to a semi being broken down ahead blocking the road. The sun set while we were waiting and an hour later we were at the Canadian border showing our passports.

The border crossing was actually pleasant – we were boarded by a senior officer who told me not to tell him about what produce I had in the refrigerator and to forget that Susan had given me a stun gun, as long as I didn’t have any real guns. He and his wife regularly winter in Sedona, Arizona and he gave me their phone number there and invited us to visit since they have RV hookups at their condo where we could stay for free.

By the time we left it was very, very dark. (More music…) I pulled over so a semi could drive in front of me to take advantage of his headlights and hopefully his knowledge of the road ahead.

The semi left me in his dust… We crawled along the very dark road into Creston. None of the instructions matched anything that Mel had given me. There wasn’t a car or a house anywhere and the signs said we still had 25 km to go. At 8:00 pm when we arrived in Creston, completely disoriented, the town was completely closed for the evening. Finally, we found a store with the lights on and the helpful clerk gave us perfect instructions to the RV park; we were only 4 km away. By 9:00 we were in our campsite, completely exhausted. It turns out that we crossed into Canada at Kingsgate, not at Porthill as Mel had planned.

I finally agreed to let Mel put the full service, talking GPS in the RV. We ended up driving 315 miles that day. From here on out, my maximum is closer to 200, maybe 225 miles if we aren’t on mountain roads.