Just more of my little ham….

A cute little video of Liam with his cousin.

Greetings,

Well we are in Kimberley and had an awesome day today. Although I have to tell you we almost didn’t make it here yesterday. Here’s the story……

I got off work @ noon on Friday and quickly headed home. We packed up the kids, left the final instructions for the dog sitter and bolted out the door. We had to get gas, drop off a house key to friends, pay a bill and then head to High River. We get to High River, stop at the bank, get a quick lunch and head south on the #2 towards Fort MacLeod. We wanted to leave the kids with “Nana” one day and head down to Coeur d’Alene or Spokane for some shopping and IHOP. Good times right!!! Well yes, except somewhere around Claresholm we realize you need more id than a drivers license to cross these days, and neither of us had our birth certificates or SIN cards. So back to Okotoks we go.

Around 3:30 we leave the house for the second time, now around 2.5 hours behind schedule and not one inch closer to our destination. This time we’re going to take the scenic (and more direct route) #7 out of Okotoks and tag up with the #22 south through Longview towards the Crowsnest Pass. Sounds good right? The roads are clear, the weather is nice, the sun is shining, and oh a snowstorm is blowing in and the wind is strong enough to whip up a tsunami. Luckily we are in Alberta and large bodies of water are a thing of myth and legend. So on we trod, undeterred from our goal, spirits high while we wrestle to keep the van from blowing into Farmer Joe’s pasture. Despite that we’ve been driving for 4 hours and we are only an hour from home, we’re on a road trip and we will have fun damnit.

Things precede uneventfully and we figure as we cruise through the Crowsnest Pass that we won’t stop for dinner yet, we will continue on and hit dinner about 6:30 in Fernie. So as we pass Bellevue, Blairmore and finally Coleman we have now driven into the aforementioned snow storm. If you’ve never driven through the mountains before then you will not have any reference for this, but the roads can get really bad really quick, and they did…. But there were lots of people on the roads, everyone seems to be driving reasonable and we are moving along at a slow but steady pace. That is until we get just outside Sparwood, BC.

After having just passed the Alberta British Columbia border and being so warmly greeted to Beautiful British Columbia we were a few kilometers out of Sparwood (Home of the worlds largest truck don’t ya know) when our Traffic Convoy comes to an abrupt stop. We wait about 10 minutes before an Ambulance comes up behind us and goes screaming past. Obviously an accident we wait in line. There is no traffic coming towards us, and we haven’t moved for about 40 minutes. Finally a guy who had gotten out of his vehicle and walked to the front of the line walks by and tells us he was told at least another 45 minute wait because the accident had fatalities. So rather than wait for who knows how long for the accident to clear we turned back and use the down time to feed our very fussy crew. So we turned around (an action we later in the evening came to name “flipping” and it’s participants as “flippers”) and slipped and slided our way back to the Crowsnest Pass passing at least 500 cars if not more.

So as the road trip gods demand, we went to Tim Hortons to have dinner and warm up. The time was now somewhere around 6:45, almost seven hours into our what is supposed to be a 4 hour trip, and we were still hours from our destination. So we filled our bellies, and filled up on drinks and snacks and headed back towards the waiting traffic. We were quickly stopped just outside of Coleman now probably 8 kilometers from our original waiting spot (that means thousands of cars btw) and waited. We waited from about 7:50 until 8:30 when we started to see a steady flow of traffic coming towards us that wasn’t just disheartened “flippers”. It was another 25 minutes before we started to move, if that’s what you could call it. But move, crawl, drag, put we did through a full out Canadian Rockies blizzard in a convoy of traffic that never got over 60 km/h.

So through feet of snow and slush, past 15 foot high snow drifts (no wonder Fernie is such a skiing hot spot) we drove until around midnight we arrived in Kimberley, BC. So 12 hours after our first departure we arrived, frazzled, exhausted, sore and spent, but we made it. Thanks God!!!

Below are photos we took today near the house we’re staying at. And just a note for those who may think this is a lot of snow, this has been a light year for snow fall in Kimberley!!!!!

Technorati Tags: accident, bad weather, Big Truck, Crowsnest Pass, Fernie, Road Trip, Snow, Sparwood