My Canada - US Travels |
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Cross Canada
BC - Winnipeg
North West Drive
Washington
BC Interior
Langley Detour
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Road Trip - Sunshine Coast, British Columbia to Sainte Adele, QuebecReturn JourneyWinnipeg to Edmonton (1435km)Thursday, January 6Beautiful crisp clear -32 C and windy day, becoming the norm for us wet warm weather westerners. We decide to come back via Edmonton, so an hour west of Winnipeg we leave the Trans Canada Highway and head north west on Highway 16, or the Yellowhead Highway. About an hour on the Yellowhead Highway and we come to a town called Neepawa. A sign greets you promising to be the “Lily Capital of the World”. Hmmmmm. A few 100 yards later, another sign “ Population 996,600 short of 1 million”, and then “If you can’t stop just smile”. So we stop to gas up and the chattiest pump attendant confirms that Neepawa has every variety of Lily plus one they created and they ship everywhere – I take back my cynicism. I like this little quaint town, we carry on. Supposedly only 6 hours to Saskatoon according to the attendant. Back to Prairie roads, with the train tracks following alongside the highway as usual. Not surprising considering our route. Brief history: CP and Grand Trunk were the two main competing rail lines going across Canada. CP got the rights for Winnipeg to Calgary, through the Rockies to Vancouver. Grand Trunk got Winnipeg to Edmonton and then through to the West Coast – an easier route to build the rail line through the rockies, but longer. When Grand Trunk went bankrupt it was nationalized to CN Rail. Hence the Palliser hotel in Calgary is an old CP hotel and the MacDonald in Edmonton is an old CN hotel. A few hours after Neepawa we see a load of train carriages on their sides neatly stacked beside the tracks, merrily rusting away. Where’s the incentive to remove them, they can’t be reused, they’re probably still on railway land, so they’ll probably be there when you drive by! They throw in the occasional curve in the road just to check that you are still awake (that or to stop us driving over someone’s land).The landscape is dotted with grain silos and farm equipment. The old wooden barns are in varying degrees of collapse due to the elements. One had even imploded. The newer ones were made of corrugated metal. Also there were the occasional old houses 100 yards from the road, but with no road to get to them. If I thought Hwy 1 was flat, Hwy 16 makes it look positively mountainous. This time though everything is covered in a light dusting of snow. The slight snow drifts skate across the road – for those Treckies, it reminded me of the intro for Voyageur going through the clouds. Or so I thought until I saw a car beside the road, “Involuntarily”, immersed in snow right up to the windows. Maybe I won’t go for a short stroll away from the road. At Dafoe, the road abruptly stops at a T Junction. Nothing there except the statutory grain silos beside the railway line and a convenience store with a couple of semis parked outside. Then dead dead flat again. We stop in Saskatoon and walk around for 40 minutes, interesting, but not enough to make us spend the night. We head towards Lloydminster where we are hoping to stay at a B&B, only to find it’s closed down. So Edmonton it is, the road is invisible, you blindly follow the trucks and hope the gusts of
wind don’t drag you across an icy patch into who knows what. Coming into Edmonton at night feels surreal as you are greeted by an oil refinery and its incandescent yellow light either side
of the highway – the city gates!
Day in EdmontonFriday, January 7We checked into a small boutique hotel in the Strathcona area last night, called Varscona. It’s great. We go for a stroll around the area, since it’s a balmy -8 C, and find out by chance that we’ve picked one of the nicer areas to go for a walk. A few blocks from the hotel we come across our second choice hotel for the night, the Met, but declined due to the added price. It looks gorgeous, next time when we’re feeling wealthy. After lunch we go for a drive, straight through downtown to the West Edmonton Mall. Wow, big – waterworld, casino, fun park, ice rink, hotel and then the shops of course. Dinner is the highlight though. Just around from the Hotel Varscona is Pack Rat Louies. To me, this conjures up an image of bar atmosphere – totally wrong. Classy and chic with AMAZING food,
with a Swiss Chef and Swiss Pastry Chef, and half the price of going out in Vancouver. We bought a box of truffles to go.
Edmonton to Jasper (400km)Saturday, January 8A short day. We did some internet business in the morning before setting off. The roads were slippery, but the mountains awesome. It makes our coastal mountains on the Sunshine Coast seem more like hills, not to mention, you’re already driving along the valley floor at an altitude of 3,500 feet. Entering Jasper Park is free as long as you don’t stay the night, but since we were $14 for 2 persons/night. We stayed at the Park Place Inn, the room was stunning. However
Jasper being the town it is (PARTY!), even in low season, the night was long and loud.
We went up to the JPL (Jasper Park Lodge) for a hot chocolate, but decided not to stay – unfortunately, it’s not a patch on the other great Railway hotels.
Jasper to North Vancouver (780km)Sunday, January 9Last day, one final push back to the coast. We decide not to go via the Columbia Icefields down to Lake Louise and then back along Highway 1 to kamloops, but just cut straight across to BC from Jasper and go straight down to Kamloops. The weather network showed good visibility but poor roads. We ignored them anyway, just as well, since they were as usual too pessimistic. Leaving Jasper we get another whacking chip, glad we didn’t change the windshield in Winnipeg! We set off West to Tete Jaune Cache (hence the name of the road – Yellowhead Trail). There, the road turns south. from Tete Jaune the mountains and valleys are stunning, but not marked on the maps as a scenic route. Probably because after about 100km, there is obvious evidence of substantial clearcutting. In winter with all the snow on it, the areas look like meadows in the forests, in Summer it probably just looks like a hideous eyesore. As we progress south, the valley widens, we’re flanked with the steaming river on one side and the railtrack on the other. The mountains become lower and more rolling, starting to look more akin to our Sunshine Coast landscape. We pass another abandoned derailed rail carriage. Next Barriere, home of the North Thompson Fall fair. Also one of the towns three years earlier evacuated due to one of the 800 plus annual forest fires in British Columbia, and you can definitely still see the damage from the road. Then past the turn to Sun Peaks, the ski resort started by Nancy Greene we approach Kamloops. Now in the home stretch, we head down the Coquihalla to
Hope, and then down into the Lower
Mainland and Vancouver. Being late we stayed with cousins in North Vancouver, taking the ferry back to the
Sunshine Coast the next morning. Odometer 12,000 KM.
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