Friday, July 28, 2017

Travel Blogging III

Banff, Alberta, Canada: The smoke from the forest fires in British Columbia is getting pretty thick here, really messing up enjoying the scenery. We're 'troupers' in the sense that we take conditions as they come, and do our level best to have a good time anyway.

 Over the years that has included being stuck at Muncho Lake in northern BC when the Alaskan Highway was washed out on both sides of us. And a winter evening in SoCal when it rained so hard the reservoir we were parked beside filled up overnight. (Rain on the RV roof is a nice sound.)

We've sometimes struggled to stay warm and other times came close to heat stroke. One summer day in Savannah, GA, when we had 100 degrees F and 100% humidity, was one of the latter.

Tomorrow we 'break camp' and drive the short distance to Lake Louise where we spend 2 nights. It is normally a beautiful place but ... with all the airborne smoke ... maybe not this year.

As we did laundry today at the neighborhood laundromat I marveled at how different the rhythms of RVing are in the age of the Internet. Time was, we'd have been reading our books while awaiting the end of the wash or dry cycle. Now we were on the local free WiFi surfing the web and doing email. Everybody looks at their phone or touchpad device while the washers rumble in the background. 

We've RVed for 45 years, summers till we retired, mostly winters now that we can determine our own schedule. We've made at least 5 cross-country roundtrips, and we don't even remember how many times we've been here in the Canadian Rockies. We think we came here the first time in 1975, so we've been here maybe 8-10 times over the years. It's a favorite.

In our travels we've RVed in 49 states (all but HI), all but one of the Canadian provinces and the Yukon Territory. We haven't RVed in Newfoundland-Labrador, or Nunavut and the Northwest Territory. We've also RVed all over New Zealand, in a rental. It has been a gas.