John Rachal's Blog

DAY 53, July 13, Saturday

After a fairly spare breakfast at McDonalds in the Wal-Mart, we got the ladder out and taped over the broken rivet as a stopgap against rain and departed Fort St. John. The day stretched out until about 6 pm, after yet another day of 360 miles. However we are well poised to cross the border into Montana and reach our Coram campground a few miles from Glacier’s West entrance tomorrow. It should be an easy day of about 130 miles. Val also was able to add one more night, making our stay there five nights.

The day was uneventful, though the heavy traffic of both Edmonton and Calgary was unpleasantly surprising, especially for a Saturday. Obviously a lot of Albertans are on the move. We continued across the prairie, and just like yesterday, the yellow glory of those canola fields in the bright summer sun simply dazzled.

We are camped in Oldman River Provincial Park near Fort McCleod in a shady spot. As usual with these parks, there is no hook-up, so it was a little warm in the camper for a little while, but not excessively hot.

I should mention that Leo and Lucy are taking all of this rather well. Home would probably be better, they have assured me, but seeing new places is pretty cool, the camper isn’t as free-ranging as the house but isn’t bad, and we sleep pretty much most of the time wherever we are.

It is 9:30 pm right now. The sun is low in the west, there are gorgeous pink and grey cumulus clouds floating low along the horizon, a still-blue sky is slipping into dusk, and a gibbous moon is rising in the southeast about 20 degrees above the horizon.

DAY 54, July 14, Sunday

We got a fairly early start leaving the Fort McCleod area of Alberta for what turned out to be about 180 miles to Coram, Montana, where we have reservations for six nights. Val managed to get video on her ipad of two commentators calling the Wimbledon Championship match between my guy Federer and Djokovich. Unfortunately, there was no live video of the actual match itself that we could get, and even what we did get did not give a continuous signal since we were on the move. In fact, I missed the whole last hour of the match, including Roger having two match points in the fifth set, but ultimately losing. The agony of defeat.

I drove the second half, but Val got us over the border crossing, since she seems more innocent. The prairie of Alberta slowly melded into more mountainous terrain, and Val had the trickier mountain roads. We passed a whole herd of bison—a couple hundred. I drove down the east side of Glacier, apparently at an appropriately glacial speed since everyone wanted to pass me, and I would pull over where I could to let them do so. Almost before I knew it we went by the very familiar West entrance. We passed through Coram to go to a car wash in Columbia Falls, and after five or six cycles, and elbow grease, both camper and Tahoe were mostly clean.

Since it was only around three o’clock at that point, our plan was to get to our campsite, un-hitch, and go over to the park, if only to get huckleberry ice cream and some information. But for several days now we have noticed from both the exterior and from the inside of the camper that the rear of the Tahoe and the front of the camper seem lower than they should be. That seemed confirmed when the front edge of the flip jack would touch the ground at an angle, not allowing it to fully extend and lock in the vertical position. We consulted Val’s always-helpful brother Kevin and we considered our options. After considerable discussion, he suggested that we raise the rear of the car by driving up on two boards, lifting the hitch high enough to allow us to lower the flip jack properly. But complicating things is the fact that we must move from our present site to another site tomorrow, as we had to do in Homer. The new site is currently occupied, so we may be stymied until tomorrow when that person moves out. Also we need to dump before taking up our new residence. Let me clarify that since it is such an excretory image and may offend poets and other sensitive types: We need the dump station to empty our black and grey tanks before taking up our new residence. For that matter, now that I have waded into this discussion—metaphorically—let’s reconsider the RV lingo: What about discharge, or offload, or even simply empty?

Anyway, we decided not to un-hitch, discharge tomorrow morning, move to the new site around 11 (check out time for the current occupant), unhitch then, then drive to the Chevrolet dealer in Kalispell where we will change oil and air filter, rotate tires, and, I profoundly hope, fix our problem. In other words, pretty much the whole day, and that’s assuming they can see us tomorrow at all.

Val made quesadillas for supper and I washed dishes outside. She washed three loads of clothes with more to come. Weather is great, the female mosquitoes are at some out-of-state professional conference, the campground is quiet and quite satisfactory, and we have high hopes for tomorrow. It’s 10:20 now and actually dark!

DAY 55, July 15, Monday

The morning played out as I described yesterday, and we decided that we actually might prefer the new site, though both are fine. We unhitched, of course, and thus for the first time in several nights we were able to get the camper level from front to back. It had been a challenge climbing up the hill from the camper’s bathroom to my bed at the back.

We arrived at the Chevy place with dogs in tow at our scheduled time of 1 pm. We changed oil but did not need to rotate tires or replace the air filter after all, both of which we had done outside of Banff on the way up. I’ll spare my legions of readers the grim details, but we have a rear suspension problem. They will do diagnostics Wednesday morning (too busy until then), order parts which might make it by Thursday, and hopefully fix it either Thursday pm or Friday. That’s the optimistic scenario, so we have paid for an additional three nights here, which happily were available. The good news is that we are 1200 miles from being out of warranty, so whatever work is necessary will be paid by GM rather than me.