(written on October 27th from notes taken previously)
My poor mom was cold last night.
Apparently the crazy, and also very cold, wind was being funneled down right on top of her, from the vent to her bed.
🥶
She didn’t want to wake me up because she knows how hard it can be for me to fall back asleep if I wake up too much.
Poor mama. 😢
It was easily fixed. I just stuffed one of my pillows in the hole, blocking all the air from even being able to get in the van at all.
Unfortunately, that isn’t retroactively effective. 😅
Amazingly, we got away early today, I think driving away from the casino parking lot before 9:00. Then we headed south down down highway 40 into the Kananaskis conservation area.
There were signs saying that we needed to have a past to enter the fairly large geographical area, and that other passes weren’t accepted in Kananaskis.
We could drive through, as long as we didn’t stop, but if we stopped at any of the bathrooms or Parks or what not, we would risk having our license plate run and getting $180 ticket if we didn’t have our license plate on the list of approved vehicles for the area.
We figured 15 bucks wasn’t a problem, and it was only going to be for one day, so We just bought the one-day pass and not the year pass, and headed down.
It was beautiful.
Contrary to the weather report, which said that it was going to be cloudy, well I guess it was cloudy, but for the most part not cloudy enough to cover up the mountains.
🥳
There was a massive amount of picture taking today. 😊
Our first stop was a place with several ponds sort of linked together. Once again, we were hoping to see wildlife, hoping that the early hour in the day, as well as the water would be a recipe for seeing wildlife, but, alas, no.
Though there was no sign of wildlife, the mountain views were gorgeous. We stopped again and again and again, so I could take pictures.
We drove up to Upper Kananaskis Lake, and spent a little bit of time there. Then we made the decision, instead of continuing South through the mountains on the route that would take us through waterton National Park, to instead go back up north on a different Road.
When we had started heading south, I didn’t realize that we were on a different road than what I had been planning for us to take. It was still a beautiful road, but after traveling on it for a bit, and then looking at the map, I realized that I had missed the road that I had originally intended to go south on, a road that I thought held promise for being A lovely place.
So we decided to head right back North, and boy am I glad that we did!
That road, highway 742, that runs from Canmore down to its junction with highway 40, was probably my favorite Road of the entire trip thus far.
It was simply breathtaking.
It was a dirt road, although an extremely wide and extremely well taken care of Road. Sure, there were places that had washboard to deal with. A lot of places, but it was probably four lanes wide worth of space, flat, and relatively sparse in terms of running into other humans. Certainly, there were cars coming fairly regularly, but it was infrequent enough to feel more… out there.
This is the road that you would take because you wanted to get away from civilization and get a little bit more out in the wild without it being too crazy.
Unlike highway 40, which of course is still gorgeous in terms of The vistas available, highway 742 is not a commuter route to go from one place to another.
It’s just a Scenic byway
And oh how beautiful it was!
The mountains were beautiful. The lakes were beautiful. The mountains and the lakes together were gorgeous!
It also was getting really cold, and apparently had gotten super cold overnight. As we started on the road, there were dustings of snow no longer just up in the peaks of the mountains above, but all the way down to the ground.
And then the snow got a little deeper to where it was maybe an inch deep, deep enough for me to make a snowball and gently peg my mom in the back with it. 😅
I noticed that it had gotten cold enough for some of the puddles to freeze over. I mentioned it to my mom, and we pulled over, and I expected it to just be a barely frozen over puddle, but when I broke through it, the ice was already a half an inch thick.
😶
I definitely didn’t expect that.
But that certainly gave me an idea! We were low on ice in our cooler. In fact, it was just cool water at this point, so I emptied out the water, and I started breaking off chunks of ice, filling the whole storage bin with Kananaskis ice.
😁
It was so nice to have this day. All of my negativity melted away with the beautiful vistas of the mountains and lakes I wanted to see.
Of course, it would have been nice had I been able to be positive throughout all the experiences either way, but it was really nice, after several hard days since the things that happened in Wells Gray, not to mention just… My life for the last many many years.
The wind started picking up pretty strongly, a very cold wind. A storm and moving in.
The wind got so strong that it was actually blowing snowflakes pretty much horizontally.
I don’t mean at an angle going down, I mean so powerful that the same flake just kept going sideways and sideways and sideways.
I don’t know if it was new snow falling from the sky and then blowing, or if it was just flakes from the already fallen snow blown into the air and sideways North up the valley.
We noticed that there was another gentleman stopping about as frequently as we were. He had a real camera, unlike my little cell phone camera, and he must have been taking absolutely amazing pictures.
We kept leapfrogging each other until finally, until finally, when we stopped to try and find a bathroom at one of the little side places, he pulled up next to us, and we chatted for a bit.
Super nice guy. I think he was from Quebec, though I think originally from a Latin American country. Not sure.
We chatted for a bit, and continued to play LeapFrog as we both headed North back toward Canmore.
Eventually, we emerged from our beautiful little Paradise to come out of the canyon hundreds of feet above the town of Canmore below.
Though I wasn’t too excited about civilization, it was kind of cool to see the town below.
It was starting to be about dusk at that point, and instead of being on our way to The border crossing into Montana, we were right back where we were last night.
😆
My mom and I chatted a bit about what we wanted to do from there. The nearest camping place was maybe a couple of hours South, and it was already getting on toward dark. And if we headed south, it would be dark for a good share of the drive, meaning we would miss all the beautiful scenery.
In the end, we decided But even though it was going to cost us another $15 to go back through Kananaskis tomorrow, we didn’t want to miss the scenery, so we just decided to go right back to the casino we’d stayed at last night and stay there again. 🙃
We started first, though, by trying to go to the Wendy’s in Canmore, only to find out that their menu was super expensive compared to the Wendy’s in the United States, so we nixed that and headed on over to Mcdonald’s again.
Would have been cool to find another Canadian restaurant or something, but Canmore clearly was not in our desired budget. 😅
Pricy little town in the heart of the gorgeous Canadian Rockies.
So we ate our McDonald’s, gathering up another 3 Canadian Monopoly pieces, and then headed back to the casino parking lot.
Just as with last night, I spent a little while walking around, but not anywhere near as much as I did last night.
As I was walking around, with the wind absolutely howling, again just like yesterday, I noticed that Rover’s vent, the same one that had been letting air in last night that kept my mom cold all night, was flipped all the way vertical.
😬
So I went inside, and found that the wind had been blowing so strongly that it had gotten underneath the vent enough to turn the vent into a sail, flipping it upwards so powerfully that it broke the frame of the unit itself.
😶
Good gravy.
I puzzled for a little while, trying to figure out what to do. It was badly broken enough, that the vent couldn’t just be pulled closed. The whole frame was broken and preventing the flap from even being able to come back down.
Gosh… What to do.
Putting the other skylight in Rover was a fairly significant undertaking, requiring my skid steer to raise me up above Rover’s roof, and I had to go up and down and up and down and back and forth a gazillion times to try and get the plexiglass in place and properly tightened down and sealed.
What on Earth was I going to do in the middle of the Canadian Rockies, far away from the kinds of places that would have the materials I needed?
So I grabbed my tools out from underneath my bed, and started doing everything I could to take stuff apart. Some of it I could take apart from below, some of it I had to take apart from above, so I opened up the back door, climbed up onto my mom’s bed, and had just enough reach to undo the vertical screws that went from the top down into the frame.
After working and working and disassembling and disassembling, I was able to get the frame out, while still leaving the vent cover in place.
🥳
But the forcefulness of the wind had broken the place on the vent flap, so it couldn’t just be reattached and adjusted back down.
There’s no more adjusting, and there was nothing to hook the vent to.
With the fan out, and the frame of the unit out, I could see that there might be a way that I could secure the vent cover back into place.
There was one place where, if I had the right size screw, I could get at least one screw into A place on the vent cover that used to have a screw in it in the past.
So I went through my stuff, the parts and screws and what not that I had removed previously in the different things that I had done to work on Rover, and gratefully, I found a screw that, with a washer, was the right size and would allow me to, as long as the plastic didn’t break with the pressure of the screw going into it, hold the vent lid in the closed position.
So I very very carefully began threading the screw into the little plastic portion of the vent lid that could accept it, and then I would back it out and brush the plastic off that it had removed from the hole, and then I would put it in a little further and then back it out and remove the plastic, doing that multiple times so as not to put too much strain and shatter the plastic, which would have pretty much put the nail in the coffin for getting the lid to close.
Gratefully, I was able to successfully get the lid screw and washer combo fully tight, and a lid locked into place. I didn’t want to trust just one screw, however, on a vent that had four corners. Just one screw holding down one corner didn’t feel sufficient, so I got my drill and drill bit and very very carefully drilled two holes into some of the other existing plastic, then getting some zip ties to zip tie the flap closed with two additional anchor points. Between the three, I crossed my fingers and hoped that it would be enough to remain stable at 75 or 80 mph going down the freeway, as well as with the fierce winds coming from behind.
With the vent all the way down, there was no more need to have a pillow shoved in the space, either, as the air couldn’t blow down and on to my mom like it had done the night before, so I left the pillow out this time, and we called it a night.
Amazingly, I was able to relatively decently keep my composure and not get too angry or frustrated with the situation.
That was another bit of a victory.
🎉
Anyway, that was the day!
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 