Upon waking up the first morning, all three of us were in for a surprise… IT WAS FREAKING

COLD!!!!! The temperature overnight had dropped to +2 celcius which is NOT much fun when camping.

On the upside, we had a very nice view of the mountains through the back of our tent fly.

A nice quick breakfast is all it took for us to get up and going. I had one of my new favorites,

french toast and man… the toast was good but the bacon sucked pig!!! It was like the bacon that

fast food restaraunts put on their hamburgers… it added more to chew on, but offered no flavor.

Damnit…

The nice thing about vacation is that you generally get a little more creative when you don’t have

the stress of worrying about school or work. Here’s my feeble attempt to be artistic. I hope I

didn’t fail too poorly, heh heh

After a quick breakfast, we decided to take one last walk along the lake and received a very nice

view from the morning sun.

So we finally made our way through Saskatchewan and into Alberta. Our first major city to hit was Medicine Hat where I noticed something somewhat odd…. these bastards stole the little ‘knight’ from Burger Baron!!!! SUE THOSE BUGGERS!

Another stop just short of Medicine Hat was out by the big massive wind-mills. Here’s our other travel partner. Originally there were supposed to be four of us, however one had to drop out due to family issues in Vancouver.

And then there was… POZ! With his Slug Pouch! (pack on my hip) This is just me standing at the base of one of the wind-mills. We got to talk to a couple guys doing maintanence on them & they said that each (excluding the blades) were 58 meters tall. With the blades, 71 meters. HOLY CRAP!

Here are the Alberta Wind Power Generators (AWPG?) in all of their 71 meter tall glory.

While en route, we stopped over in Lethbridge for lunch and a check of a museum. Here’s Mark, however I still say that the big foot here looks a LOT like the one in Northern Alberta. Am I wrong? I most certainly don’t think so!

HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP! IT’S THE MOUNTAINS!!!!!!!!!!! Sorry… the last time I saw the mountains was too damn long ago (well, not counting seeing them from a frickin’ airplane. Or the mountains in Japan. Or seeing them from the Vancouver airport.)

As the evening of day 1 approached, we had finally wound up at Waterton National Park. Here is a neat little picture of the lake itself, I -THINK- it’s called ‘Waterton Lake’ but I could be completely wrong, and I just don’t care enough to go and do some research for you people. Please correct me if I’m wrong on this one.

As a celebration for arriving safely (and without a speeding ticket) in Waterton, we all decided to hit up one of the nicer restaraunts in the Waterton townsite. We went for a nice leisurly dinner at the Kootenai Brown Dining Room where we had a lakefront view. It was quite nice, except for the damned aphids that were flying around and trying to land on my dinner. Mark had the crab cakes, Keiko had the salmon and I had the whole trout. Man oh man, that was a good meal.

So as day one came to a close, we all hopped into the tent. Me on the outside, Mark in the middle (so he could annoy both of us equally when he started talking in his sleep), and Keiko on the other outside portion of the tent. Thankfully I was given a big quilt to help keep us warm which CERTAINLY helped since the temperature went down to +2 celcius… too cold for my blood. Goodnight Waterton.

Hey everybody! I thought that I may as well do ‘proper’ updates for everyone since I was just doing little wimpy updates from my cell phone, so here goes!!!!

And so it begins…

The first day of every trip is usually the longest and the most un-eventful. It’s not too bad if you have traveling partners but if you have to travel alone… god help ya! I had the pleasure of two traveling partners, Mark and Keiko, both buddies of mine, one an old student, one an old friend. Keiko happened to be in Canada at the same time as our trip and Mark just wanted to come along for th ride!!

As our day progressed, I figured that I should start off by doing the driving and get the feel for things. As it turns out, I did most of the driving throughout the entire trip as Keiko doesn’t have an international liscence (and hasn’t driven for 6 years) plus Mark was content sitting and navigating as well as reading maps to me.

This was one of our first ‘passes-by’ on the trip, Vanscoy. A little town of no consequence.

As we continued on through Saskatchewan, we all started ton wonder just what kind of weather we were going to start having. This view shows what the clouds looked like and thankfully, we had no rain until on one of the last days although these clouds could have told a different story. The first day started out nice and sunny in Saskatoon but got cooler and cooler as we drove West and into Alberta, definitly unusual considering the direction we were traveling.

As you can see, the three of us were loaded for bear. A shiny car, a GPS (Magellan eXploris 300) and a radar detector along with Mark’s Zen (mp3 player) and my XM radio. I don’t think there was a silent moment during any of our driving!

I found this in the small small city of Swift Current… wasn’t it featured on an episode of ‘South Park’?

This had me worried… a ‘Nuclear’ symbol on the back of this car. Oh great…. needless to say I passed this guy in a BIG hurry!

So there you go, that is Day 1 part 1. I’ll try to do a few updates per week, maybe a few per day, who knows!? Have you ever been to Waterton? What did you think about it? Where would YOU like to go, should you ever have the chance?

So after a not-so-warm night of camping in the mountains, we wake up
relativly early and continue on our merry way. First stop is
breakfast, a nice morning platter of bacon, eggs and french toast
should set most people right and wash away those cold-night blues.

After a quick breakfast, we take another quick stop up at the top of
the small hill where Waterton’s famous ‘Prince Of Whales Hotel’ is
located. We take some snap-shots, revel in how incredibly windy it is
and then make a run for the border.

Surprisingly, at the border we aren’t hassled at all, it’s pretty
darned quick! I’m impressed! Nothing like the last time where we had
a US border guard who had an incredibly heavy irish accent asking us
where we are going, saying we are passing through on vacation and have
him reply “yes, as it should be…” that cynical bastard.

We make our way through the border, past a borring stretch of land
only to find that a little off the road convinient store carried the
BEST root beer in the entire world, Henry Weinhards Private Stock.
There is NOTHING in the world better than this stuff, sadly I only
bought a 6 pack of bottles… I regret not buying 3 dozen already.

So we get to the mountains, drive through, it’s beautiful, HOWEVER we
have one issue… the parking lot at Logan Pass is COMPLETELY clogged
up. What in the hell!? We wait and drive in circles for a good 45
minutes expecting something to come… but it never does. Frig, so
away we go again.

Our final destination spot is out in Missoula where we find the KOA
campground, however sadly all of the ‘Kamper Kabins’ are booked so we
need to tent it again. At least it’s not +2 celcius that night.

More to come later, my fingers are tired, my neck is sore from driving
and I’ve got some kind of rash…

Well the first day has come and gne. It was hell of a long drive from Saskatoon to Waterton, but we made it. Leaving Saskatoon around 7am certainly helped but we still arrived in Waterton (Alberta) at about 6pm.

After setting up checking out a couple campsites, we all decided to use the campground that was located inside of the town site. A hop, skip and a jump later and we were setup and wandering around the town.

That’s all I will writw for now as we are getting ready to leave. Ill post more later!