It was really, really cold last night. No surprise, I suppose since we were at about 1,000m in Manning Provincial Park. I was glad that my resident toque was available. Even Eliot wanted to sleep under the down sleeping bag rather than on top of it.
We hit the road just after 8am. This was after breakfast where I discovered that I had only brought along instant coffee. We stopped for real coffee and yogurt in Princeton after our first mountain pass of the day. I had decided to take the southern route to Alberta as I’d never been through Manning Park and never driven Highway 3 along the southern edge of British Columbia. By the end of the day, I feared that I might have done some damage to the old van’s newly refurbished engine. We’re not outside of Creston after some brutal climbs. The last one was Kootenay Pass which goes up to almost 1800 metres. There was still lots of snow at the summit. And the grade was so steep and so long that at times we had to creep along at about 35 km/hour in second gear. It was slow going and made for a long day on the road … just the sort of day I had vowed that I would try to avoid. Even Eliot was getting pretty antsy when he still hadn’t had his dinner at 6:30pm. Oh, and I forgot to mention that it rained most of the day.
Tomorrow we may make it to Calgary … or not.
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