Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Remember me?

Hello everyone! It has been a while since I last posted so bare with me....this may be long and gruelling. Here is the quick version...Brian and I are back from our 11 day drive across Canada (for a few weeks now). We had a good time. It was long, but not bad and boring long. It was nice to spend so much time together alone...day and night! We only got into one little (okay, maybe a little bigger than little) argument along the way. We weren't sure which way to go coming out of Regina, SK so Brian was "talking loudly" to me to get the map out and I couldn't get it quick enough and we ended up going the wrong way, which of course was all my fault. You know, it's not easy to turn around a 26' truck pulling a 10' trailer but somehow we managed to pull a u-turn in a quite intersection and that gave us something to giggle about! It was kind of cool to see what each province has to offer. It took us a long time to get out of BC because of the mountains. The truck could only go up them at a speed of about 30km-which meant putting on the 4way flashers each time and being passed by the semi trucks; a little frustrating to say the least. Alberta was fast. We stopped in Medicine Hat to have a quick visit with an old friend and then we were in to Saskatchewan that evening. The prairies were a sight-but a sight that got boring after a day or so of looking at the same thing; wheat, wheat and more wheat! Ontario was pretty. It has a LOT of water. All kinds of little lakes and water streams that are almost connected but actually different. It took us 2 days to get through Ontario. Not too bad. Quebec was a bit of a challenge seems how neither Brian or I speak any french-haha. We tried to get through that as quickly as possible. We ran in to a bit of truck trouble when the engine kind of just died coming in to New Brunswick...we managed to get it to the Super 8 around midnight where we stopped for the night. U-Haul hooked us up with a mechanic in town the next day to look at the truck. It ended up being the fuel pump that went. He said we were very lucky he was able to find the part at a neighboring GM dealership as usually U-Haul has to send the part in from their warehouse. So it was a long day hanging around the shop waiting for the truck. We were finally able to go on our way at about 4:30 that day. We drove until dark then opted to stop for the night. That put us a day behind. We only managed to travel about 2-3 hours that day, as opposed to our usual 12-14 hour days. We finally made it in to Nova Scotia on the Saturday where Brian was meeting his "friend" Leroy, whom he met when Leroy bought some truck stuff off Brian on Ebay. We were delivering a truck cab (which Brian managed to squeeze into the back of the U-Haul). Then Sunday we hit our destination of Somerset where the truck and contents were to be delivered. It only took about 2 hours to unload the truck as we had good help on the receiving end. Then we were off to Halifax to spend our last couple of days. Dropping off the U-Haul was a nightmare- the drop off location was a little service/gas station way, way out of Halifax, in the middle of nowhere. It took us over an hour to find-after getting lost a lot, having to buy a map of Halifax, and almost getting the truck stuck in downtown Halifax (which is very similar to downtown Vancouver). Then the kid working at the station had know idea about anything! Literally! I asked him how we could get back now that we had dropped off the truck- he said, "get back where?" I said, "anywhere" he said, "I don't know" I said, "is there any taxi's?" He said, "I don't know" I said, "Do you have a phone book?" He said (you guessed it) "I dont know" Now I am getting really short, let's say, with him...I managed to get a phone number for a taxi company and Brian and I sat on our luggage waiting to get out of there; a sight to be seen I'm sure! So a $30 taxi ride got us back to downtown Halifax where we managed to get a room at the Holiday Inn. Finally we could relax and play tourists until it was time to go home. We were able to stay an extra day and come home on Monday night, so all worked out okay. I would have liked to see a bit more of the country but in order to do that we would have needed almost another week or two. I surprisingly didn't take a whole lot of pictures as it was too hard to stop everywhere in the truck and too hard to take pictures from the truck window. We all in all had a really good time, but it was nice to get back home-as always.

Our ride for 11 days straight! You can't really see it that well, but that's a car and trailer we were towing a well!


Welcome to Melville, SK (haha)


We were glad to see this!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Melissa, glad the trip went pretty good. I actually have a friend in the new brunswick area on vacation right now. I missed your blog. I was beginning to think that you had forgotten us.

Michelle Nelson Beaulieu said...

Sounds as though it was great! I love your "cab" story! I guess that brains are not a prerequisite for working for U-Haul!!! Missed you too!

Meredith said...

Feel free to stop by anytime. The small world is even smaller when blogging.