After giving some hard thought to our preparedness for long lonely roads ahead in Canada and Alaska, Dick decided we needed to pick up a few spare parts for the RV. We did a late breakfast, cleaned up the RV and Dick tried, with marginal success, to remove the mark along the passenger side of the RV we received from our scrape with the tree in the park two days ago. Then for the first time we drove the car and RV separately, heading to Williston, ND where Pat found a laundry mat to do a large amount of laundry while Dick looked for a truck parts store to get two belts and an oil filter and a fuel water separator filter for the RV. He could only get the air conditioning belt so we have no spare serpentine belt. Need to find that one somewhere. We met and hooked up the Saturn Toad then lunched at a Taco John’s. Now off to Canada!
We arrived at the border crossing on ND route 85 at 3:20 and mileage 19417. That’s 2,313 miles from Fleetwood! A good start. The crossing security went relatively smoothly with the Canadian agent asking only a few questions and then looking into all our drawers and closets. Then off to Canada…..over the hill and Whoops! What’s this? The road ahead as far as we can see is a gravel road!! And we are towing our car! We have never even opened the box the Tow Car Shield is in! Now we need it in a hurry and the wind is gusting at about 40 or 45 mph. We pulled over and got to work. It must have been a sight if anyone had been there to see it but we made a good team. It took about an hour to figure out how to get the shield to go onto the car, adjust the tighteners and be ready to go. Dick kept a close watch on it in the TV back up monitor when he could see it through the dust.
Thankfully the gravel road lasted for only about fifteen miles. However the very strong winds continued all the rest of the afternoon as we drove to reach Regina, Saskatchewan. This is one of the prairie provinces of Canada and the land is truly flat and level. The farms are very large and houses outside the cities are spaced often by miles or in very small communities with a grain elevator being central to the towns. Many of the smaller grain elevators appear to have been closed and the towns are dying with only a small gas station and perhaps a very small general store remaining open. Selected towns have new much larger grain elevators and they are thriving much better. Regina is the capital of the province of Saskatchewan and isd a large metropolitan city with big buildings, suburbs and a network of major highways. We are pleased we continued to receive our XM Satellite Radio stations her in Canada although we had read that they stopped in Canada which made no sense to us that they would stop. We camped at Buffalo Lookout municipal campground located east of Regina. The site we took turned out to not be level and we had to fully extend the front levelers on the RV raising the front tires about 3 to 4 inches off the ground. We could see prairie dogs in the field ahead of our location and there were even some within the campground.
We arrived at the border crossing on ND route 85 at 3:20 and mileage 19417. That’s 2,313 miles from Fleetwood! A good start. The crossing security went relatively smoothly with the Canadian agent asking only a few questions and then looking into all our drawers and closets. Then off to Canada…..over the hill and Whoops! What’s this? The road ahead as far as we can see is a gravel road!! And we are towing our car! We have never even opened the box the Tow Car Shield is in! Now we need it in a hurry and the wind is gusting at about 40 or 45 mph. We pulled over and got to work. It must have been a sight if anyone had been there to see it but we made a good team. It took about an hour to figure out how to get the shield to go onto the car, adjust the tighteners and be ready to go. Dick kept a close watch on it in the TV back up monitor when he could see it through the dust.
Thankfully the gravel road lasted for only about fifteen miles. However the very strong winds continued all the rest of the afternoon as we drove to reach Regina, Saskatchewan. This is one of the prairie provinces of Canada and the land is truly flat and level. The farms are very large and houses outside the cities are spaced often by miles or in very small communities with a grain elevator being central to the towns. Many of the smaller grain elevators appear to have been closed and the towns are dying with only a small gas station and perhaps a very small general store remaining open. Selected towns have new much larger grain elevators and they are thriving much better. Regina is the capital of the province of Saskatchewan and isd a large metropolitan city with big buildings, suburbs and a network of major highways. We are pleased we continued to receive our XM Satellite Radio stations her in Canada although we had read that they stopped in Canada which made no sense to us that they would stop. We camped at Buffalo Lookout municipal campground located east of Regina. The site we took turned out to not be level and we had to fully extend the front levelers on the RV raising the front tires about 3 to 4 inches off the ground. We could see prairie dogs in the field ahead of our location and there were even some within the campground.
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