Rainy Hinton Day

Hinton, Alberta, CA – Saturday, July 8, 2011 

As you know from yesterday’s blog we camped at the Hinton Walmart last night.  It’s a really popular stopover for RVers.  They kept pouring in all night. It started raining about the time it got dark and continued all night long.  It’s cool enough that we didn’t need to run the AC so we got to listen to the rain falling on the roof.  Makes for good sleeping.

Listening to weather reports this morning, there are large amounts of rain predicted for the northeast corner of British Columbia (BC) and northwest Alberta.  That, of course is the direction we want to go. They are also expecting that folks in NE BC will have to evacuate because of flooding along the Peace River.  Once again, that’s our intended route. 

There are so few roads up here, that if one highway is closed, it means hundreds of miles of detour. In our case it’s a 230 mile detour to avoid the potential flood area.  We may alter our route to take a more southern route to miss most of the rain. So, we’re going to lay low for the day and see what havoc the rainfall causes.  We’re also going to check out the local McDonalds and see if they have a free wifi connection. Today will be devoted to working on the blog posts. We are nine days behind.

A few items that made the local news we watched on our one over the air channel:  Will and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, are at the Calgary Stampede.  There are estimates that twice the normal crowds turned out to see them, almost 800,000 people.  We also got to see the last shuttle lift off, and are so glad they thought it worthy of reporting up here.  Canada is miffed because our ending the shuttle space program has a big impact on their space program as well. They supply the Canadarm for the shuttle bay.  And finally one for Texans,  Willie Nelson is apparently going to be prosecuted for drug paraphernalia possession. It seems that a deal had been reached to allow him to pay a fine and put this behind him, but the prosecutor has retracted the deal and now wants him to go to trial.  The Canadian view?  Doesn’t American law enforcement have anything better to do?  They do have a point.

Now a few Canadian items that we’re dealing with…

Just when you’re resigned to dealing with the metric system, they’ll measure something in feet or pounds to confuse us. It’s hard to stand in a store and try to convert costs/weights so you know what how much you will be paying.

In general everything is more expensive. We have found a few items that are comparably priced, but not many.

They don’t have paper dollar bills.  Instead they have loonies and toonies.  Those are heavy one and two dollar coins. Try carrying 8 or 10 dollars in your front pocket.  It’s a challenge to keep your pants up around your waist.

Time is stated on a 24hr clock basis. And their dates are in year/month/day format.

Budweiser is almost $50 a case.  It’s over $5 a beer in restaurants.

Turkey is $26 a pound.  What, they don’t raise turkeys in Canada?

You want a cart to put your food in at the grocery store?  That’ll be 25 cents please.  But you can carry them in your arms free of charge.

So far we’ve found two TV channels.  The Canadian national channel in English (is there anything but soccer or Will and Kate?), and a French channel.

Money exchanges like this.  If its paper, a US dollar is worth about 95 cents Canadian.  But US coins can be used at 100% face value. Huh?

Don’t get us wrong, Canada is a beautiful country, and the people we’ve met have been very friendly and helpful.  But it does reaffirm for us that the US is a pretty great place to live.

BG Miles Today	0	BG Total Miles	3888
Eat Out total $	290.41	BG Total Fuel $	2033.41
Entertainment total $	104.10	Total Camping $	541.88
E Miles Today	3	E Total Miles	1518.15
E Total Fuel $	303.59	Day # of Trip	37