Where were we now? Ah yes...sleeping in a Co-op truck stop in Moosomin, Sask.
After filling up with diesel and propane this morning (we need to run our furnace even when we are driving to keep the water lines from freezing at these cold temperatures), we tentatively “hit“ the black ice roads on the Trans Canada Highway headed for Swift Current, Saskatchewan. The GPS said we would be in Swift Current around 2:30pm. Not bad! Not a full day of driving....or so we thought! Richard couldn’t drive very fast on the black ice so after about 2 hours of white knuckle driving at 60km/hr we finally hit good pavement. Richard is an excellent driver and he said today was the toughest drive he has ever had!!
We stopped at a Flying J truck stop on the outskirts of Regina because we couldn’t see out of our dirty windshield. The driver’s wiper doesn’t seem to work very well, even though Richard got new wiper blades on Newman from an RV dealer before we left on this trip.
Richard was taking a very long time outside Newman after he washed the windshield and I was wondering what was he was looking at? He came inside the RV and said “We need to get to an RV dealership fast! Water is spraying out of the side of the RV!” What he didn’t say was we had a sheet of ice on the side of the RV from where the water was leaking!
Luckily we were only 12km away from Village RV in Regina. We called them up and explained our problem and they said they would have a technician ready for us when we arrived at the dealership.
It turns out that the water line to the ice maker in the freezer is not in the heated garage of the RV and this blue plastic part froze! We can live without ice in the ice maker but ALL OF OUR FRESH WATER was gone! Luckily the RV dealership was amazing and filled us up with more fresh water so we could get back on the road and they didn’t charge us anything to help us out which was very nice of them!
We left the RV dealership around 1pm and arrived in Swift Current at 5:15pm. It was a long day on the road and we knew that once we stopped for the night (in a Walmart parking lot) we would be mopping up all of the water that didn’t spew outside the RV and went into the carpet in the rig. Good thing we are stopped at a Walmart to buy paper towels and after 24 rolls of paper towel and a lot of stepping on paper towels to soak up the water, we now have our furnace on high to try and dry out the carpet!
Swift Current has huge snow banks! The kind of snow we get in Ontario in January and February when it has snowed for weeks on end AND there is more snow coming overnight! -3C going down to -9C. I couldn’t live in this Province..! Flatter than flat and nothing to see on the drive but bald faced prairie for miles and miles and miles.....let’s hope tomorrow our adventures are fewer....and like I said bad things come in 3’s...new fuel pressure sensor for Newman when the check engine light came on in Oakville, a new battery for Jerry in Winnipeg, and now a water line ice maker part which we will try to have repaired somewhere in B.C. Fingers crossed for us please that we’re done with repairs for awhile!
