Donner and l are sitting in the little park right now overlooking the river in Calgary waiting for the Land Rover mechanic to finish up. They are replacing the broken tire rod for my front right wheel, which I had shipped to me at the airport and picked up this morning. They are also changing the fluids, and will try to figure out why the check engine light is on. The issue with delayed firing up in the morning seems to have resolved itself by high-octane gas. I also resolved the no reverse problem myself. If it's not one problem, it's another.
After we get the Defender back we will head to Banff, 80 miles distant, and then point the Defender north to Alaska, some 1500 miles or distant. After we enter Banff, we will have reached the point of no return. If a problem develops after that with the Defender, with Donner, or myself, we will have to stay where we are until the issue is resolved.
For convenience, we stayed last night at an RV camp just off the road on Eagle Lake not too far from Calgary. The experience was a new one for Donner, not because of the camp environment, but because the presence of coyotes. Donner gave off a rather interesting look when he heard their yelping and howling, or whatever it is that coyotes do, the kind of look that someone would give when they were thinking, what the hell is that? It reminded me of my trip across the prairie in 2000 when Sonntag and I were camped out not too far from here and we were also surrounded by coyotes. They apparently do not like presence of a larger predators in the area. They specialize in small domestic animals.
Random thought. Friend asked me a while back when I think about driving on these trips. It's a good question, because I do have 8 to 10 hours a day to do nothing but think. Of course, the first things that are on my mind are the drive and the road, that winding grey ribbon that never end, except at places where few sane people would dare go. Next come the statistics that I calculate in my head, most of which my Garmin GPS is now providing, except that they do not tell me the most critical piece of information I need, what time is sundown where I am heading. Fortunately, I have gotten pretty good at estimating what time the sun will disappear over the horizon where I am heading. At some point I will explain the formula when I have more battery.
As for my other thoughts, I could probably list about a dozen major topics that I think about while I am driving, sometimes aided and abetted by the selections of music that I play. Sometimes, it is not my choice of the music since Donner's favorite headrest happens to be on my iPad on my console, and the music selection changes every time he sighs or moves. So most of the time I get to hear excerpts from the music that happens to appear on the playlist near the music I wanted. One piece of music that he bizarrely selected happen to be Unchained Melody. When I listened to the words, I decided that that is going to be the musical piece that I will use to trigger my memories of him, given the fact that he was chained in several LA backyards for his first four years before I rescued in in October 2015.
As I have written before, there are many purposes, benefits and advantages to these trips, but one of the biggest advantage probably is the fact that it gives me eight hours a day to do nothing but think as I drive along, a luxury few of us have at home - to sit and think eight hours a day. What I do is select a topic, pop it into my brain as you would a DVD into a DVR, and then ruminate over that topic for a few hours of deep thinking as I drive along. Once, when the topic du jour was "people from my distant past," with Oldies from the 60s booming over my Beets helping me revive old memories, I challenged myself to think about which girlfriend from post-high school to before I got married at 26 should I have gotten to know better or, other things being equal (like mutual feelings) married. So, in the fashion of one of those refraction-testing phoropter devices used by ophthalmologists, looking back through the lens of who I turned out to be, in chronological order, I reminisced over each of several "girlfriends" from after high school until I got married. "Michella or Peggy? "Michella." "Michella or Katie?" "Katie." "Katie or MaryAnne?" "Katie." "Katie or Judi?" And so on I went. Finally, after a few more iterations of this somewhat futile exercise and much thought and serious consideration, I made my decision. No doubt about it. I will not mention her name here for fear that one or more of the others may be following this blog. I did not bother to go through a similar exercise for those girlfriends after I got divorced because that would have been much too complicated and, besides, there is still time.
By the way, this exercise was in no way meant to slight my ex-wife of vie years who was an extraordinarily lovely woman. I just wish that she and I had kept in touch over the years.
To those who think I have too much time on my hands on this trips when I am driving, you are absolutely right, an average of eight hours a day to be exact. But I enjoy every mile of it.
By the way, this exercise was in no way meant to slight my ex-wife of vie years who was an extraordinarily lovely woman. I just wish that she and I had kept in touch over the years.
To those who think I have too much time on my hands on this trips when I am driving, you are absolutely right, an average of eight hours a day to be exact. But I enjoy every mile of it.
The weather so far on this trip has been generally splendid, except for the few bouts of rain that we had to go through either setting up for breaking camp and that dreadful three-day drive across the prairie from the edge of Ontario to Calgary. Tonight, as we head into the Rockies, it will turn cold, and the winter sleeping bag and knit night cap will come out for the first time.
I probably will not be posting many photos until I get to Alaska because I will have no access to Wi-Fi over the next week and every photo I send by 3G is costing me hard earned money.
As we head up north tonight into Banff, where I hope to stay at Johnson's Canyon campground, we have two weeks to get to Denali National Park. I hope that we can also squeeze in three days of the Dalton Highway to visit the site of that photo in the National Geographic magazine of Sonntag and me going into the camp in the middle of a snowstorm. It was on that site exactly one year later that I scattered Sonntag's and sister Kessie's ashes, but a visit to that site will involve three nights of camping on the Dalton at a problematic time of year weather-wise and a long haul over a treacherous pass. We'll see.
As of today, we complete the first of the three major legs of this trip. We are also 1/3 of the way through the miles and time.
The photo today is of Donner admiring the 30 or so bison we ran into at Audy Lake in Manitoba. I can only imagine what he was thinking. "Huh, what are they, dogs?"
Ed and Donner, from on the road
P.S...I apologize and take full responsibility for all typos, errors and ambiguities in this message. I do not have time to edit or even proof my messages. Please do the best you can to interpret what I wrote.
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