Ahh... the beach.

So, Noah and I had all sorts of plans to post each night of our roadtrip from Banff to Sauble Beach. We were going to post pictures... talk about crazy things we saw... it was going to be awesome.

Alas, it didn't happen. On Tuesday after I worked until 4pm, we drove from Banff to Cochrane to pick up my dogs, then on to Medicine Hat, where we spent the night with my Aunt and Uncle.


Wednesday was looooong. We were out of the house by 6:30am, and made it to the Wild Horse border crossing into the US around 7:45. We had to wait for the border guards to open shop (precisely at 8am), and they proceeded to take as long as possible to check our car; not because we were threatening, but because we were probably the only people going to cross at that location that week. We were cleared, the dogs were cleared, but their dental chews almost didn't make it across-- the smily face on the front "looked like arabic writing", so we exited the car while they looked through the back. Lovely.

Montana was a long haul, filled with many exciting locations! Noah and I played a game where we had to point out things outside of the car following the alphabet. It's harder than it sounds considering the only things we had were the road itself, the sky, and the fields (Asphalt! Bovine! Cattle! ............... the rest took us awhile).

We were nervous about the first few hours in Montana because that was our only time not on the interstate in the US, but those little roads were actually great. Traffic free, 70mph on a perfectly straight, flat road as long as the eye can see... lovely.

We finally made it out of Montana and into North Dakota. The first 40 miles were beautiful, the badlands a lot more dramatic than in Montana. Unfortunately, the next 300 miles looked a lot like the same boring little bit between Edmonton and Calgary (or London and Sarnia) over and over and over. We stopped at a city just before Minnesota for dinner, then made it to our goal destination of St. Cloud, Minnesota around 11:30pm. If we don't use Onstar again all trip, using it that once to call ahead, exhausted, asking for a pet-friendly hotel on the interstate in St Cloud, having a reservation made, and exact directions (exit 171, take an immediate left, look past the home depot and it's on your right...) was worth the $20 it cost extra this month.

We passed out right away, but the dogs sure didn't. They had been in their crates for about 16 hours and were wired.

On Thursday morning, we met up with Andre, a friend of ours from university who is a choir conductor in St Cloud now. It was a great start to the day, which was shaping up to be a good one: breakfast with a dear friend in the morning, and the promise of home cooked ribs with another friend, Lori, if we could make it all the way to Kalamazoo that night. Fortunately, we did, despite the brick wall of traffic we hit in Chicago. We actually left the interstate in favour of surface roads and went through a pretty harsh neighbourhood, but it was great because we were actually Moving.

Lori and Kevin hosted us that night at their gorgeous home near Three Rivers and the ribs were everything she promised and more. The dogs got some good outside time, too, which was nice for them (and a lot of lap time with Kevin). We slept in on Friday, not getting on the road until about 10, because... we were almost there.

We made it to Sauble around 5pm, and it was wonderful. We got out of the car, took out the dogs, changed into swimsuits, and ran into the lake. It was cold, but good. The dogs had a noticeable change to them; they instantly -settled- like they hadn't done while we were travelling. They get along well with Eddi (Noah's mom's dog), and we took them for an awesome hike while rock climbing yesterday.

So, 2200 miles later, we made it, and have spent some wonderful quality time with friends and family. Vacation is awesome. I highly recommend it.

If I can fix my laptop to accept Noah's camera card, I'll post some pictures later!