Thursday, August 18, 2011

Our Trip part 1

Leaving the home front Tuesday,August 2 at 7:30 am. We had the van loaded with food to last us a good week,camping gear for 8 people and 1 suitcase of clothes for each person. Everyone was allowed ONE carry-on as Rita would say. Here they had activities for along the way. Raechelle kept the children in line by doing coloring and drawing contests on the way. The van windows got many decorations and smiley faces taped to them as we traveled along. The first day was the longest day of driving as we drove through the flat prairies.








In Sask. we planned to meet our married children Josh and Rebecca with his parents who were travelling home from a family gathering in Alberta. It gave us a little time to stretch and say good by to them,because after all it would be 2 weeks before we would be seeing our little grandson again!





Arriving at the first campsite at Chin Lake Alberta about 8 pm. This was a self check in campground. There were signs on the grass saying not to set up tents on the grass. But there was no one to ask why not and it looked so much more appealing to set them up on the grass instead the hard gravel and we couldn't see any harm in it. But we were in for a surprise when during the night the automatic,built-in lawn sprinklers went off! We were up in a flash, that explained why no tents on the grass. In the morning we had a few good chuckles and had learned another little something. Why do we want our children to obey???





























A family picture before we left the next morning.





After driving an hour or so the next day we began to see the mountains. This was exciting as the children had never seen the mountains before. That day we drove into Montana and spent the rest of the day in the Glacier National Park. Here we had a picnic lunch,hiked some trails and saw some lovely water falls and lakes. The color of the lakes was so pure and clear. We drove right next to the snow and got to touch some of it! The rest of the pictures are taken in Glacier. That night we stayed at a campground where there were bears around so we took extra caution by packing away ALL our food and not leaving any table scraps around for them to be attracted to.
















































































2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, there....I enjoy reading your blog which I found some time ago already. I have one question...how do you plan for your meals if you pack for a whole week? How many repeats? How simple? Any fussy eaters? And do you accommodate them somewhat, I guess? Which groceries do you buy en route, if any? Thanks very much. Maybe you want to do a separate blog entry for this! :)

Living In His Blessings said...

Hi to you... Thanks for commenting. Thankfully we have no fussy eaters only some very hearty eating boys:) So it does not work to just skip a meal here or there. We had planned this trip for some time and that gave us time to prepare some food that would be convenient and simple to serve. We did some soups like taco that we could freeze in a pail and also pork and beans and chili on a bun. We took eggs along from home,cooked them for sandwiches. made bannock mixes where you just need to add water and you bake it in a pan. This is good with any meal. Its like a bread. Meat like farmer sausage is easy to take along and fry with potatoes and raw vegies. The children all baked a batch of cookies or muffins so we had several pails of them we took along. We did have some things over but when everyone was hungry they were happy for anything as long as it was food. You may be asking how did we manage to keep all this cool. That wasn't really to much of a problem. We had several coolers and if you have lots of the stuff frozen(we even took our own frozen milk along)it stays frozen for a long time. After awhile we added ice when it was needed. We also had one fridge the size of a cooler we borrowed which plugs into the lighter of the van. We ended up with two meals at a restaurant and had pizza twice in the two weeks we were away. Our aim was to spend as little money on food and rather on places we wanted to tour. Hope that answers some of your questions.