On the Road Again...

For the past ten years my husband and I have shuttled back and forth from the Coast of BC to visit our loved ones in Calgary. From Vancouver, the journey always begins in the wee hours of the morning, travels through several majestic ranges, up and down passes hemmed in by picturesque mountains, then we are finally pushed out into the breathtaking Big Sky Country that is Alberta.

It is a remarkable trip that we have down to an unremarkable science. He drives, we sleep (which is a nice change from "Isla screams").  We drive from full to fumes, sometimes rolling into gas stations just to make the very best time we can. Before kids the trip took around ten hours. After, it could take upwards of twelve. Rossland is smack in the middle, almost a perfect 600km bisector between Vancouver and Calgary. It now,  in theory, takes half as long to get to either end.
















I always envy my dear friend who stops. She stops in Osoyoos and lets the kids play a round at the mini golf. She stops at parks and she lets the kids out to play, completely disregarding how this effects the "time" she is making from point A to point B. As much as I "know" life is about the journey and not the destination somehow I never was able to make the literal jump!  We decided to stop and smell the proverbial roses.

Frank Slide sits at the foot of Turtle Mountain and neither Mike or I had visited the site for the better part of two decades. We left the dogs in the truck and went in with the kids to the lovely new interpretive centre. It was a wonderful digression. We watched documentary films, played with touchable exhibits, read heaps of first hand accounts and relearned about this historic, and preventable tragedy.

90 minutes later we returned to the vehicle ready and eager to get back on the road. Mike opened the door and was met with a terrible stench. Velma had unleashed an epic and entirely preventable tragedy of her own. We had left her out of her kennel. It was all over Isla's car seat and everything surrounding it. Not unlike most trips into the city we were returning at capacity and the kennel needed to be collapsed to fit Santa's booty into the wayback. That was a mistake. The mess only seemed to have hit porous, absorbant surfaces. Ughhh. I think we used an entire box of baby wipes to little or no avail. We lamented the remaining hours in the reek. As it turns out, nothing gets rid of that new car smell like a dog with diarrhea.