A Little Further Down the Road from Dogpound

Early to bed last night so early to rise this morning. We wanted to stop at Duty Free to pick up some smokes for Brenda so we arrived at the crack of 7AM there. They were better than 50% off from the normal price at home, so she was a happy camper. Then it was off to see the Customs fellow at Sweetgrass to see if there were going to let us in this time. No problem he said, just make sure you take your wife home with you when you go next spring. Didn’t ask about food, or much of anything, except for weapons, but being lawful citizens all ours are locked up in the gun safes for the winter. We will have to depend on an overdose of pepper spray for our personal safety should that become an issue. We had a beautiful sunrise over the Sweetgrass Hills to welcome us to Montana,

and then it was off down I-15 for a long day of driving. What with the weather being good we were able to stay right on the Interstate and not take the Whitehall cut-off that avoids the high country north of Butte when there is inclement weather. We fueled up in Great Falls, Dillon and here at Fort Hall, Idaho where we are enjoying the hospitality of the Shoshone-Bannock people in their RV Park for the night. They have a nice facility here and although we usually find a spot to boondock somewhere enroute it was a long day on the road and probably not worth wandering around to save a few bucks.

Well That's a Wrap

and we are off on another adventure. We came scampering home from the American SW about 43 months ago, we were running from a virus and here we are almost four years later and it still hasn’t caught either of us. We crossed the border after a run north that was almost surreal, the only vehicles on the road from Salt Lake City north were packing Canadian license plates and I hope all those folks fared as well over the intervening years as we did. Life brought us some ups and downs but all in all it was OK. We had a pretty good summer at Dogpound North this year and concluded that we should do what we could to extend it. After scrambling around the past week or two getting ourselves and the rig ready we were packed and ready to roll late this morning. We wandered down to Milk River and are holed up in the local campground here for the night and will cross the Medicine Line first thing tomorrow morning. It seems that we are not the only folks running for a land south of Winter as this spot is chuck full of RV's. The weather is great today and predicted to be good for the next few days so that should give us the option of meandering southward in a more relaxed fashion than our usually pell mell race for someplace below the Frost Line. We left home today with water onboard not antifreeze so that is a good sign. It is just a 4 or 5 hour leisurely drive from DPN to here, so we are breaking in Brenda slowly. Tomorrow I expect we will cross early, and then make tracks across Montana, looking for a nice spot to pull over for the night. Not exactly sure where we will be tomorrow, and the day after that is a long, long, long way in the future for an RV adventure so time will tell where we end up and if I get my fingers in gear maybe I will share it with you folks.

Since this blog was really active the whole world has migrated from these written epistles to video logs and I can’t convince Brenda that she should be packing a camera and narrating every part of our adventure so you folks will just have to settle for this old fashioned form of journaling.

Well here we are in what is rapidly becoming the end of September. We have been busy around Dogpound North with a bunch of stuff that I won't bore you with here, but rest assured I have been putting the miles on the last month or so. We spent a few days up around the Buffalo Creek Ranch and then down to the J4 at Alliance for a visit with some friends. Once that was all done we figured we probably need to head west and spend some time with our friends on the Island. We took three days to get there, time slows us all I guess. But we did stop for a visit with my cousin, Wally, in Chilliwack, overnighted in North Vancouver and caught up with Heather's world travels before jumping on the boat to find a spot to hole up in on a beach south of Nanaimo. We had a great time visiting with old friends John & Gina Odo. Brenda and them have been friends for a long time beginning in what is a fondly remembered misspent youth.

And we even managed to fit in a lunch with Croft a blogger/RV'er who calls Campbell River home, and Don and Angela Ritter some folks we usually see in Yuma, Arizona where they hole up during the gray months of a Vancouver Island winter.

Then it was time to head back through the Rockies to our Alberta home. It is a beautiful drive this time of year, but unlike the drive out we only lingered a little on the way back so it was just a day and a half affair. Since getting back we have been busy, the trailer is in Red Deer getting a new Goosebox installed, and I have been running the roads between Rocky (Lacey) and Chestermere (Becky) getting in some visiting and helping them with a couple of things along the way. Today Brenda is hard at it turning our apple harvest into pie filling that will be much appreciated sometime this winter. Me, I am just sitting here supervising that operation and contemplating heading south in a few weeks.

Summer Musings

If you came for the pictures I will let you down easy. No cool pics here, but I did think I needed to catch up on what has been happening here at Dogpound North. Since my last update in June we have been doing some mechanical upgrades around the place. Started off with installing a new heating plant. The old one has served us well, but it was put in when we built the house 40 years and was probably state of the art back then, but the art of heating a house has changed significantly over the past four decades. The old natural gas furnace was about 60% efficient and back in the day that was pretty good and gas was cheap and plentiful in those days as well. Well in the intervening decades gas has become more plentiful and not much more expensive, but the wisdom of our government up here in this place we affectionately call "the land north of summer" has made burning gas a much more expensive proposition what with their version of a revenue generating tax they claim is doing a wonderful job of changing the climate here on this planet. Call me a skeptic but I think the facts are actually a little different. Canada is responsible for about 1.6% of the total green house gas emissions on this third rock from the sun. So in reality we could shut off the heat, close the roads and all begin succumbing to hypothermia here in the Great White North and it wouldn't make a whisper of a difference to the global situation. But all that said the point of the story is we are doing our part with this new furnace. It has an efficiency rating of 97%, but it is still burning that good Canadian Natural Gas. The pointed heads in our capital would have liked us to go with some kind of heat pump, but those folks haven't figured out that once it gets down much below zero there is precious little heat to pump in Canada's frozen north. But wait, that's not all. Our home was built in the early 1980's and used the best of the best when it was designed and built, my Dad didn't do anything halfway and this house wasn't going to be where he started. The walls are thicker than usual for that time, and the windows were amongst the best available at that time, but again time takes a toll on all of us, even windows so we ordered new windows, top to bottom, last February and in the middle of July a crew of guys came by and installed 23 super duper triple glazed gas filled windows and a matching pair of patio doors. Amazing what two Ukrainian boys, one who has been here for a decade or more and the other who is just new to the country could do in a short five days of work. They did a great job and although we can't tell what impact the new glass will have on the heat situation this winter, we sure have noticed that these new windows keep the house a lot cooler in the summer, without us even having to pull the blinds. I will drop a couple of photos of the during and after of the window installation in somewhere here.

While the windows were being installed we packed our stuff and spent that time living in the RV across the yard so that the crew didn't have to have us mucking about in their way, and could leave their tools, etc. in the house. They did a great job of cleaning up after themselves and other than those stickers on the windows left nothing behind. The new windows are great but anyone who knows Brenda knows those stickers have been driving her OCD crazy. I have a guy coming tomorrow to do an Energy Audit on the house and once he is gone so are the stickers. Now that all the reno work is done we are hoping to drag our RV out and see a little country for some time this month. It is time to take my Mom home to Auburndale where she will join my Dad, and brothers in her family plot, along with her folks and her brother. Hoping along the way to visit some friends who ranch up in that country as well, and then it is home to daydream about leaving all this energy efficient stuff here to look after itself this upcoming winter. Not entirely sure where we will spend the winter months this year but we are sure hoping the butter stays soft wherever it is. This Blogger app is long past its best before date so rest assured I had paragraphs and sentences in the version I typed, but it appears that is beyond the capabilities of this program now. If anyone has a better way to do this on a Mac machine, let me know and maybe, just maybe I will get more updates done.

HANGING OUT Figured it might be time to do a short update and maybe change the view a little.

The shot above is at Gap Lake along Highway 1A west of Exshaw, Alberta. We haven't been doing to many exciting things here at Dogpound North. Brenda has been tending to her flowers and with the ongoing drought we have been experiencing it is a constant battle to keep them hydrated. We have been busy getting Mom's house ready for its sale and distrubuting family "heirlooms" and donating the rest. The house was sold last week so that journey is now complete. The trailer is still sitting, not even dewinterized as yet, but who knows, maybe this week. I have been having some issues with the solar charging system so will need to get that figured out before we head off into the wild blue yonder. To change things up a little we decided we needed to take a drive out west into the mountains. We went out as far as Lake Louise although not right to the lake, to many people there I am sure. Our drive took us past Gap Lake (photo above) and then out the Bow Valley Parkway past Castle Junction where we had captured a shot of Castle Mountain that will be included here. Castle Mountain has a storied history at least the naming part of it. It was orginally called Miistukskoowa by the Blackfoot people for a long, long time, time immemorial they say. And then along came the Europeans and in 1858 decided it should be called Castle Mountain, because of its resemblance to those European Castles I suppose. From 1946 to 1979 it was renamed Mount Eisenhower to honour the Supreme Allied Commander after World War II, then those pesky European/Canadians complained enough that it reverted back to Castle Mountain. The pinnacle at the Eastern End of the mountain 9right side of the picture) was named Eisenhower Tower at that point and that is the way it remains until now. If I actually knew how to pronounce it I would call it by its Blackfoot name Miistukskoowa, which for all I know just means a really big pile of rocks. No matter its name it is pretty majestic. We had lunch on our way home at a favourite Canmore restaurant Rocky Mountain Flatbread and headed back into our drought stricken neighbourhood. Blogger was its usual PITA and I had to rewrite this a couple of times but one good thing has come from the delay. This morning after my usual session at the swimming pool it started raining here at DPN and hopefully will continue for a long, long time.

Just a little postscript, for those who are wondering I have left the borg for all intents and purposes, I no longer frequent Facebook or Instagram, although I do still have a Messenger account.

Still Kickin'

 It has been a while since I last popped into update this blog. We are all alive and well here at Dogpound North and the clunky blogger app makes updating this journal a bit of a chore, especially if I don't have a bunch of exciting things to share.

It has been a pretty decent winter here at DPN, not to cold, but a fair amount of snow. We aren't complaining though we can always use the moisture, no matter what form it comes in. January and February just slipped by without a lot of fanfare. I did manage to get to the pool on a semi-regular basis and combined those trips with wellness checks on Mom's condo. 

Brenda and I did spend 7 or 8 days clearing out Mom's things and preparing the condo for sale. Not sure when that will happen, but it is ready to go whenever. 

With all that behind us we thought we probably needed to get away a bit, and booked ourselves a trip to Maui for a little sun and sand. We headed off early in March and spent three weeks touring the Island, watching whales and sampling a bunch of sub-par restaurants. The best meals we had the entire time came out of our own kitchen. We did find a great food truck, Da Nani Pirates, that did a great job on fish tacos.

It was Brenda's first time to Maui so there was lots to show her. I have been there a few times but we did manage to do something I had never been able to accomplish before and circumnavigate the whole island. The northern end is narrow and scenic but I had done that before. However the road the Hana is usually an out and back affair as the road around that end of the island is quite often closed, as well as in the past being off limits to rental cars. I think they recommend a high clearance vehicle but with a little caution we managed to slip around with our Mustang convertible with only a little dirt and dust to show for our efforts. It is a beautiful drive and only about 10 miles in the middle is rough and narrow, although some parts hang along seaside cliffs there was nothing really bad if you were willing to take it easy and use a little caution. And only a couple of times did we meet others in places where we couldn't sneak past each other. Kind of like being back on a seismic line in the old days.

Honolua Bay on the North End, Molokai in the background

We stayed in a condo near Maalaea and enjoyed a bunch of great sunrises.

And we did see a few whales, one time we had three, Mama, baby, and an escort breaching all at once. The human eye can catch a lot more than a camera so the best pictures are saved in our minds, but these might have to do for the rest of you.

And then they said goodbye and went deep.

When it came time to head home we were at the airport when it seemed they couldn't get our plane started and cancelled our flight. It took awhile but Air Canada sprung for a room for the night, not fancy, but clean and a nice pool to cool off in after a long hot wait at the airport. It didn't hurt my feelings that they brought over a new plane the next day for our ride home while the mechanics worked on the broken one. It was a good time on Maui and seeing as how they had put some of the folks who were in a hurry on other airlines for the ride home we had a lot of extra room to stretch out on the plane.

Last summer our trailer had some damage to the front cap and the roof from a combination of falling trees and a big wind storm here at home, so it spent the winter up at Woody's getting all that addressed by the insurance company. We brought her home today, so are hoping to get back out and see some country this summer.

 

Mom and Charlie II

Georgia Brown 1929-2022

After a wonderful Christmas where all her Grandchildren and Great Grandchildren were able to come and visit with her my mother passed away peacefully on December 29th. She had been diagnosed with cancer a year and half ago and made the decision to live out her life without spending a lot of time being sick and tired from treatments that would probably not extend it much anyway. As she said "I am 93 and have had a good long life, done a lot of things and will leave here with few regrets. On to the next great adventure."

She was born in Vermilion, Alberta the first child of Brent and Ethel Macnab. She spent her early years there on the family farm, growing up with her younger brother Brent. They travelled back and forth to school on an old draft horse that my Grandfather had to tune up from time to time when he decided it was not a good day to go off to school. Once she was done in that one room school she went off to Vermilion to finish her grade school. She was her Class Valedictorian and commented in her speech at the grad ceremonies that she and all her contemporaries heading off to University would have to sit out a year as the soldiers were coming back from World War II and they would be taking all the available space that year. She was 16 at the time. She spent that year working at Longs Drugs in Vermilion and completed her Apprenticeship for her Pharmacy license almost before she entered University. Sometime along the way she met and fell for my Dad, and was married the fall after graduation. Dad was a Calgary kid and working in the oil business so after their honeymoon spent on the backroads of Alberta scouting drilling rigs and seismic crews they moved into a house on 17th Ave, near 19th Street NW. While they lived there I came along and derailed her Pharmacy career for a few years I suppose. I was followed by two more brothers, Brent and Kelly, but once she had us house broke she went back to the Pharmacy business and ended up managing a chain of drugstores in East Calgary. 

She was one of the very first women Licensed Pharmacists in Western Canada

We did all those things that families in the 50's and 60's did, camping, hunting, and fishing together. I remember almost fondly tramping along irrigation canals in Eastern Alberta looking for Ring-necked Pheasants, Mom on one side with her 20 gauge and Dad on the other with his old 12 gauge, and one bird dog or another ranging between them till we filled their limits. She only shot one big game animal to my knowledge, an antelope, and decided that it was more like shooting the neighbours dog than hunting so she hung up her rifle.

As she moved out of the Pharmacy business she took on the challenge of doing the books for both my Dad's companies as well as for Macnab Farms a farming operation that her brother Brent and her ran jointly for near 30 years after taking it over from my Grandfather when he decided to slow down a little.

Another of her long term hobbies was knitting and she knitted sweaters for everyone she knew, a couple even showed up at her service, and mittens by the thousands. One time I drove her down to Phoenix and she was in the passenger seat her fingers just flying and those needles just clicking away. By the time we finished that drive she had the entire footwell full of mittens. One of my memories as a little kid was holding skeins of yarn on outstretched arms while she rolled it into balls in preparation for another sweater, toque or more mittens. Later in life she started knitting small dolls that were sent off to far away places for kids, I know she had an award for knitting 5,000 of them and I am sure she made another couple of thousand before she retired her needles last year. Many of her friends from the complex were wearing those little dolls pinned to their jackets at her service yesterday.

Over the years she traveled extensively, both with family and her friends. She made it to every continent on the planet with the exception of Antarctica, guess growing up in East Central Alberta cured her of the need to head into the snow and ice.

She had a WELL LIVED LIFE

And that is all we can really ask for. RIP Mom and say hi to all those who went before when you get to the other side.