The wonderful nature of Canada

After leaving Hitchbot, we knew we had a very long and hard drive ahead of us. We had to drive more than 2000 km’s through the flat and boring middle part of Canada. (sorry guys!) Locals say that you can watch your dog run away for 2 days and I think they may be right. There was one good thing we discovered while driving this boring stretch of road and that was the Husky Gas stations. Rather by accident, we stopped there one day and saw that they had a shower facility, so we went over to the girl behind the counter to ask how much it was for a shower. She said it was 8 CAD, which we thought was a lot, but she said that we could get one for free if we took a bonus card from Husky and registered ourselves. We could get the card for free and use their phone for free, so we said: “hey why not…” After a few minutes on the phone, they said that we needed an address here in Canada to be able to register and since we do not have one (yet?! Haha) we couldn’t register. So, what did Seb do, he went over to the girl behind the counter with his puppy dog eyes and asked her if we could use her address to register… I think it was the strangest request the girl had ever had, but she was super nice and just gave her address to us. So now we are trustworthy members of Husky and we can shower for 50 points. We received 500 points for registering and every time we take gas there, we receive some more bonus points. In the meantime we have more than 650 points and we have already had a couple of free showers!!! We love Canada!

We also found a cool trick to get free water. We just go to a local drinking fountain, take our small empty bottles of water we have kept, fill them up and pour them into our big empty water bottles. This way, we save more money. Since we got Peanut here, we haven’t paid a single time to sleep nor to fill up our water tank of the van. Our biggest expense for the moment is of course diesel.

After all this boring stuff, we finally came to the Rocky Mountains and some more National Parks. We saw a lot of baby blue lakes lined with snow topped mountains and lush green forest.

We saw some more wildlife, like elk and bison and there was even a squirrel that was very photogenic and definitely wanted his picture taken!

One day we were parked right beside a very beautiful lake and Seb got up at 6 o’clock in the morning to take some pictures.

When we left Belgium, Seb’s colleagues had given him an army food package. They give this to people in the army and with it you have your food for the next 24 hours. We decided to do a long walk just before lunch time, so we decided to take it with us and prepare it on top of the mountain. Most people had their sandwiches with them so we got some strange looks from everyone when we started to prepare our warm food! The package was only expired for 3 years so that was still ok. Only the chocolate had turned white and the caramel was hard as a rock, but for the most part, we enjoyed our little luxury item, so thank you guys!!!

We have enjoyed the National Parks of Jasper, Banff and Yoho and are slowly going to our meeting in Nakusp.