Arrived in Edmonton

Leslie Monday, September 15 and Tuesday, September 16, 2008

We’re been making a series of one day travel days. On Monday we drove to Whitecourt, a location selected merely because it was on the route to Edmonton and I found a campground still open. The roads have gotten much better although we’re still hitting a lot of frost heaves. These are different than the frost heaves north of Haines Junction. The frost heaves in Alberta somehow are beneath the asphalt - there’s a dip, but the asphalt is unbroken. You can identify the dips because just beyond the dip there is an oil spot on the road. Hitting the frost heave too fast means that there’s a lot of rocking and rolling inside the trailer. I have a child’s eagle stuffed animal on an open shelf in the back. I know that if the eagle flew during our drive, things in the cabinets will have shifted. The eagle flew on Monday! Despite the rough roads on this trip, we haven’t had much breakage. Today we did have to throw out our last insulated plastic glass. I like the insulated plastic because they don’t sweat from condensation but these glasses seem to crack very easily.

On Tuesday we drove on to Edmonton. We’re staying at Glowing Embers RV Park on the west side of town. The park is huge – 380 sites! Surprisingly the sites are very nice. Each site is quite wide (plenty of room for a picnic table to the side) and separated from the next site by a substantial tree. We choose a back-in site because it is closer to the WIFI access point. Often the rear view from a back-in site is another trailer. Here they’ve done an excellent job of offsetting the sites so our rear view is of a tree in the next row.

Driving into Edmonton we really felt as if we’ve come back to civilization. We’ll stay here at least four nights. It’s nice to be stationary after a lot of driving over the past week. My big plan for tomorrow is to visit the West Edmonton Mall - the biggest mall in the world. The Mall has over 800 stores, an amusement park, a water world, a hockey rink, a golf course, a sea world type show and more. What a contrast from Alaska!