Alberta Bound

Well I'm home again now, back in good old Raymond. I actually got back yesterday morning but we invited Adrian over as he wasn’t going straight out again. Yesterday was great, we got back just before lunchtime which was perfect timing, Jan picked us up at the truck and on the way home we gave Adrian a tour of our town.

Sunday lunch was the usual Lomanovskis fare, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and parsnips, mashed potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower and gravy, washed down with a nice fruity Cabernet Merlot.

Okay, so the run back, we bumped into a couple of H&R drivers in the new Cascadias at the Montreal Flying J, and compared notes. I was a bit annoyed with 2148 coz she bit my Sirius antenna cable in half so I had to do a quick repair job and while I was at it I buried the wires inside the dash.

We scooted round to the Montreal H&R yard, picked up our new trailer, which was pretty light, and started the long drive West.

I have to say, I really liked Quebec and especially Montreal, it’s a very clean City and nicely laid out, they got some weird traffic lights though, I've heard a lot of people say it a nightmare to get around but it seemed okay to me and most people seemed friendly enough, apart from one driver who spoke to me in French, I apologised and said I didn’t speak French, he sneered at me and walked off.

I didn’t realise how close Montreal was to the Ontario border and before we knew it we were in Anglophone Ontario and driving thru the centre of Ottawa, for those who didn’t know, Ottawa is the nations Capital and if you have read this blog from the start you will also know it was named after a famous First Nations tribe of the same name who reside in the area. For anyone who is interested, the famous Chief Pontiac was an Ottawa.

As we were driving the CNH (Canadian National Highway) we obviously didn’t see a lot of the city but what we saw looked pretty nice, some great old buildings and again looked pretty clean. We didn’t get as far south to skirt Mississauga so unfortunately we had to give the Polish Hotdogs a miss, I was pretty devastated but I don’t think H&R would have been too chuffed with me if I took a detour just to stuff my face.

Once we got to North Bay we were on familiar ground as I've done this route quite a few times now and ive got into a little routine. We were suffering a little now from lack of sleep, the roads aren't too good along here and its difficult to sleep. We had plenty of time for the delivery so we decided to take 5 hours out, park up and get some sleep, I think we made the right decision and both felt much better for it.

We actually parked up in a little independent truck stop so we went in for breakfast before we left. This was another excellent idea, sausage, 2 eggs, hash browns and potato patties, washed down with coffee, all for $5.75, what a result !

The rest of the journey was pretty uneventful and we only stopped for fuel and the occasional photo shoot and before we knew it we were in Calgary and parked up. I phoned for a load to get us down to Lethbridge but there wasn’t anything. This wasn’t a major drama though as it was nearly 22:00 so the plan was to get a couple of hours sleep and phone Lorna at 06:30, get a load and scoot down to Lethbridge in time for Sunday lunch.

Well that went as planned and we came down via High River, we ran into a little problem at the meat plant as the paperwork wasn’t in order, well actually it was completely screwed up but "Yours Truly" spotted the mistake and we got it rectified before we left the customer.

And that was that, 12 days on the road, made some new friends, met up with some old ones (sorry Kev & Lisa, when I say old I don’t mean you are old, I meant I already knew you LOL) took hundreds of photos, ate some great food, added 2 new states to my list and 1 province. I also met 3045's new driver and an H&R driver from Australia. I would also like to apologise to the hundreds of drivers that I blinded during the night driving stages and would like to point out that 2148 is in the shop as we speak having her eyes sorted out.