Our Trip to Canada

Kelly and Jeremy got married on July 13 2024 in Scotland. It was on Zoom so all of his family and ours were able to attend virtually. Joyce and I were asked to speak as were Jeremy's mom and dad. I didn't do a good job, because I started crying about halfway through. I am getting weepy now just remembering the emotions.

On July 27, Kelly and Jeremy came to Texas and we had an in-person wedding party. Steven and Cathy each attended. Jerry and Cheryl came in so a good time was had by all. We had a BBQ Food truck come in and it wasn't bad BBQ.

A day or so after the party, K & J flew to Edmonton Alberta Canada where Jeremy is from. His parents and other family all live in the area. Joyce and I wanted to meet Jeremy's family, so we decided to drive from Anna to Canada. We rented a car from Alamo rental to drive up to Canada. We left home on Aug 6th. For the trip, I had grandiose Visions that Joyce would work on her computer while I drove and listened to books on tape. To accomplish that, I ordered from Amazon, a car a/c inverter to power her laptop. I also bought a camera for the car. Let me explain the camera.

About 2 weeks before we left for Canada, Joyce and I were on 75 coming home from dinner. When we got on the highway, we saw this gray Toyota getting on ahead of us. The driver was weaving back and forth in the entry lane. When we got on 75 headed for Anna, I got away from the guy, because I suspected he was either drunk, high, or sleepy from the way he was weaving. Boy was I prophetic. We were in the fastest lane on 75 driving at about 65mph when the same guy hit us. We were travelling straight on 75, and he was behind us. His left front smashed into our right rear. We both pulled over and exchanged insurance. He did not have a physical card with him, so he had his wife text him a copy of the card. I should have called the police as soon as he ran into us, but I was trusting that his insurance company would do the right thing and repair the dent to our car. Boy was I wrong. We hassled with his ins company (Progressive) for over a week and they refused to pay. They said their insured claimed both he and I were moving into the same lane and collided. That was an absolute lie on his part. The day after the crash, I went to Best Buy and got a front and rear facing camera for both Joyce's car and mine. So when I rented the car from Alamo, I went to Walmart and bought a smaller front and rear facing camera for the rental. I tested it out before we left for Canada, but the first day we started getting error messages on the screen about memory storage.

We drove the first day to Trinidad Co. We found a Walmart close to our hotel and I took the camera back in to exchange it. I got a new camera, and it was doing the same thing. I found out there was an option I had not set to the correct value, and it was not able to store video on the memory card I had installed. Once I had the option properly set, the camera never burped the rest of the trip.

The second day we drove from Trinidad to Buffalo Wy. We didn't have any issues with anything that day. It was just 8 hours of nothing but fields of straw. The mountains in Colorado were very pretty, but Wy. was kind of boring.

The next day, we drove to Lethbridge Alb Canada. That part was also uneventful.

We arrived in Edmonton the next day. We had our first “poutine”. If you haven't had this dish, try it at least once. We went to dinner with Jeremy's mom and had poutine as an appetizer. I don't think Joyce liked it much, but I did. For those who don't know, poutine is French fries with cheese curds, and gravy poured over it all.

We had one party at Jeremy's grandmother's retirement home. They rented out the party room for a brunch.

The 2nd day in Edmonton we had K&J 2nd family celebration. We got to meet most of Jeremy's family and they were all really nice. Again, a good time was had by all.

The next morning we had brunch with Jeremy's dad and step-mom. They were the sweetest people and we really enjoyed the visit.

But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. It was time to head back to Texas. We had planned to take a different route home and stop by Mt. Rushmore in S. Dakota. We had pre-paid for the tour, and had planned our travelling to line up with the reservation at Rushmore.

We left Edmonton on Monday, 12th and drove to Regina Saskatchewan. It did not start out well. As we were leaving Edmonton, our Waze started acting up. It was not updating. I tried Google maps with the same result. We did not have a paper map to help us, so we left the Inter-state highway we were on to find a gas station that had maps available. This proved to be somewhat of a disaster. It is really hard to find maps/atlas’ anymore. We went to 2 different stations trying to find a map. No such luck. At the 2nd station, we got back into our rental and tried Waze again. This time it came up, and started working again. This little detour cost us an hour and a half travel time and tons of frustration. We got back on the road to Regina SK. We had planned to arrive about 4pm to check into our hotel. We didn't get to Regina until after 6 pm and we were shot. We got a book of hotel listings for that chain from the front desk that had some maps in it and used this as a backup in case Waze started acting up again.

Tuesday the 13th we left Regina for Mt. Rushmore. It was supposed to be a 9 hour drive time trip to get there. We left Canada at Regway. Back in the good old USA with MPH instead of KPH, and gallons of gas instead of liters. After we crossed into USA, Waze let us down again. Somewhere near Wilbeaux ND, Waze told us to take I-94 west towards Billings Montana. This was way west of our route to Mt. Rushmore, But we thought maybe there was construction or something. We went West on I-94 for about an hour and a half. Finally I told Joyce something was not right, so we did a u-turn on I-94 and headed east towards our original route. This added at least 3 hours to our 9 hour trip for the day. Once we got back on our planned route to Mt. Rushmore, the rain started. It was not a little Texas shower that lasts for 45 minutes, this one was of Biblical proportions. It lasted at least 4 hours, and was so hard, at times I could not see the center line of the highway, or either shoulder. It was raining so hard, I had to slow down to 45 mph for most of the time that it lasted. At 845 pm, I told Joyce I had had enough. I had been driving for 12 hours at that point and I was beginning to question my abilities to continue driving safely. Joyce called the tour company to cancel our tour the next day. We were still 3 hours away from Mt. Rushmore and the tour started at 7 am the next morning. I knew we could not get up at 4 am and drive down in time to make the tour. There went $300 out the window. We also had to cancel our hotel room at Mt. Rushmore. Joyce was able to find us a motel room for the night close to where I called it quits for the day, and I crashed like a rocket. We got up the next morning and continued on down to Anna. Neither Joyce or I have seen Mt. Rushmore, so it was a big disappointment not to see it on that trip. One of these days we may take a long weekend and try to see it again.