Oh Canada!

Wow, another week has gone by! We left West Yellowstone on Tuesday and moved up to Great Falls, Montana. Great Falls was a stop to take care of a few last minute things before crossing into Canada and kicking the trip to Alaska into high gear.

We both had to do our semi-annual blood test for cholesterol screening and get our prescriptions renewed and filled. As with many things it took longer than we had expected but we did get it completed.

Great Falls was also the place we were meeting up with our friends Fred and Jo Wishine, The Wandering Wishnies, whom we will be traveling with during our Alaska Adventure. Although we exchange emails every day, we had not seen Fred and Jo since we went birding together in Patagonia, Arizona back on March 15^th.

The RV Park we stayed at in Great Falls was some kind of staging area for people headed to Alaska. Amazing everyone we talked to around us was heading to Alaska.

We did find time to visit the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center while in Great Falls. I have always been amazed by the Lewis and Clark trip. Over those three years in spite of all of the dangers and hardships, they only lost one person and he died of a ruptured appendix. Once the expedition arrived at Great Falls they found 5 waterfalls that they had to haul all of their gear and boats around. This ended up being almost a month of hard work. The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center does a wonderful job of explaining the expedition and the difficulty of the trip into unknown territory in the early 1800s.

Finally, with all of our prescriptions taken care of, we headed north to Canada. The border crossing wasn’t very busy on a Saturday afternoon, but they only had two people on duty so it took about 20 minutes to cross the border. When we last crossed in to Alberta from Montana (1985) there were only about three questions and it only took about 3 minutes. Things are more questions today and we had to show our passports, but still no big deal. After an overnight stop in Lethbridge, Alberta we are moving on to Banff National Park today.

We have read and been told by numerous people that as we move further north, both Internet access and quality becomes more intermittent. Fred and Jo have a DataStorm satellite dish. Through their kindness I currently have Internet access, but at some point even that will not work. I will update the blog as time and Internet access permit as we move north.

PS For those of you that don’t watch hockey, Oh Canada! Is the Canadian national anthem, if you’re an American and know all of the words, then you’ve been watching too much hockey!