Last Day in Hinton – (we hope)

Hinton, AB – Saturday, July 9, 2011

Not that there’s anything wrong with Hinton, but three days is long enough. It’s off tomorrow for the Grande Cache, Grande Prairie, Dawson City route.  We checked the RCMP web sites this morning for road conditions and 2 of the 3 routes to Alaska from our current location are impassable due to rain damage.  Route 16 to Prince George is washed out and Hiway 2 to Peace River is under water.

We spent two and a half hours at McDonalds this morning getting our internet fix.  Internet withdrawal is not a pretty sight, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.  We’ve read all our emails, caught up on Facebook, did some research and paid bills. Oh yeah and posted five blog updates.

Next, we took care of the logistics.  Topped off Big Guy with diesel and propane, dumped the holding tanks and filled with water. One thing the Canadians have available at no cost are frequent Sani-Dump sites with fresh water connections. Then we headed towards a new campsite, the local IGA grocery store.

Hey, they have a big sign in their parking lot inviting RVers to spend the night so we’re just acquiescing to their request.  And I’m sure we’ll spend some money in their store too.  It is funny though, it’s past 10PM and there is only one other RV in the lot. Bet Walmart has a bigger crowd. 

Low and behold we actually have an internet connection here. Now we won’t have to go back to McDonald’s to post! We did drive around town and took a walk in the rain just to see what we could see.

Since we only drove Big Guy 5.7 miles since the last fill up this was a ideal time to reaffirm the generator fuel consumption.  It had run 9.6 hours on this tank. And the calculations showed that on average the generator consumes one half gallon per hour.  So right now it’s costing $2.20 per hour to make electricity.  Makes your local utility sound positively cheap doesn’t it?

OK guys, we finally did it, we’ve caught up on our blog posts!! Now we can continue on our trip. We really need to do this daily, but we are usually too tired from all the fun. Plus if we don’t have wifi we rationalize that we can’t post  so . . .  Anyway, we’d love some feedback about the format and any suggestions on what you want to read.

BG Miles Today	7	BG Total Miles	3895
Eat Out total $	302.07	BG Total Fuel $	2055.30
Entertainment total $	104.10	Total Camping $	541.88
E Miles Today	10	E Total Miles	1528.15
E Total Fuel $	303.59	Day # of Trip	39