Current mood:

sleepy

Big road trip - Part 1

Somewhere near Sicamous, BC



My first vacation in over 10 years, and our first family road trip outside the province was amazing! I'm still recovering from it though, holy hell am I out of shape :S

We left Friday, the 23rd at 10 pm as soon as I got off work. Piled the kids into the van & set out on the longest, most amazing drive ever! We figured it would be better to drive through the land of the living skies at night (Saskachewan), and we were right, the northern lights were active all the way through (better than endless hay feilds)! Since Roman was driving, my only job was to stay awake and watch the light show. Unfortunately we didn't get any pictures, since it's not easy to take pictures of the northern lights in the best of conditions, I didn't really get any when we were flying through on the highway.

There's really not much more than that, stopping at Tim Hortens every 200 Kilometers, stopping for gas in Regina (with the petro guy staring at us like we were insane) being flashed by all the semi's that thought we had our brights on (fricken van), and the kids mostly sleeping brought us through to Swift Current by morning.

The plan was to spend the night in Calgary or Canmore in Alberta, but once Roman saw the Mountains on the horizon he couldn't wait to get into them. So we detoured through downtown Calgary, stopped for a quick lunch and headed back on the road until Golden, BC and spent the night there.

It was very cool driving out there, way different than driving in the praries, not that Roman was giving up the wheel or anything, but that left me free to enjoy the majestic scenery. We were fine up until Langley, in BC and got lost looking for the ferries, but we made it before the last one so all was still good. Roman got some spectacular pictures of the sunset off the ferry, and despite the wind we had a lot of fun, none of us had ever been on a ferry & the two youngest pixlets had never even been on a boat :)

We made it to my favorite Aunt & Uncles (in Sooke, BC) at some point in the evening on Sunday (time was a bit fuzzy by then, and we'd crossed 2 time zones) and by then our brains were a bit fuzzy too. Roman couldn't find the driveway, and was just starting to get edgy when one of my cousin's boyfriends ran down to find us. They were so wonderful, not only putting us up for the 5 days we had out there, but filling every minute with something spectacular!

Now that this is long already, I'll break it up with a picture from the ferry and continue on to day 1 in the next post.