Ok. Today has been a lot longer drive than we planned! We are still on the road so I’m not sure if there will be many photos today. We will see how it goes.
I’m writing the blog as we drive and that’s not normally how I roll!
Last night after we had dinner, and Richard had his shower, Richard starting messing around with the control panel at the front of Newman. I was still finishing up the blog and I knew something was bothering him so I asked him ”What’s up?” It turned out that we were running our diesel generator, but it wasn’t powering our house batteries. The house batteries power our lights, microwave/oven and our plugs, when we are boondocking, so if the house batteries are not being charged as we run our diesel generator, we are draining our batteries and we would soon be out of power. Richard kept trying to figure it out and finally I said “Text St. Stephen!” Now St. Stephen is in Nova Scotia on his 14 day quarantine, but we didn’t know if he would be awake or not. Sure enough I had just published the blog, and St. Stephen was waiting up to read it!
.St. Stephen told Richard to check if the breaker on the Onan diesel electric generator had been tripped. He also said to Richard ”you might want to put on a pair of sweat pants over your pyjamas”. At first Richard couldn’t understand why he needed to put on a pair of sweatpants as he went back to the bathroom to the control panel to check on the breaker. St. Stephen said, “No, you have to go outside and pull out the diesel generator and check to see if the breaker has been tripped on the generator at the front of Newman.” He also said “You are stopping at enough Walmarts on your way home - you might want to buy a pair of sweatpants, just in case you need to run out in the future if anything else goes wrong!” How funny is that?
So because Richard doesn’t have any sweat pants, he had to go back to our bedroom, get dressed and then go outside in the Walmart parking lot to pull out the diesel generator. Sure enough, the breaker switch had been tripped. Richard flipped the breaker, came back inside, turned on the diesel generator and voila! We had a generator charging our house batteries again! Since last night was our first night of BOONDOCKING since we left Fanny Bay, we wouldn’t have found this problem out, until we didn’t have an electric plug in for the night. Good thing St. Stephen was able to help us all the way from Nova Scotia last night! Thanks again St. Stephen! Still coming to our rescue and he’s many time zones away from us!
We had a great sleep in the Walmart parking lot in Swift Current and we woke up fairly early this morning and after I showered we were on the road at 7:15am! What an early start to our day!!
Saskatchewan is miles and miles of watching your dog run away for days! Combined with grain elevators and trains. That’s about it!
We stopped briefly in Broadview, Saskatchewan at 11:25am for propane at a Co-op gas station in the middle of no where Saskatchewan to have the gas station attendant tell us he was over worked and short staffed. We saw one other vehicle come to the pump while we were stopped there waiting for propane for 20 minutes.
After we fuelled up with propane we realized that we would be arriving very early to the RV park we had booked for the night in Brandon, Manitoba. Since the weather and driving conditions were good, I called and asked if we could dump our waste tanks and fill up with fresh water for a fee, instead of spending the night. Darlene at Meadowlark RV park said that wouldn’t be a problem.
When we arrived at Meadowlark Richard had to figure out with Darlene’s help how we could get water from the RV park Office since the water at the actual RV campsites was not potable. After dumping our tanks in a RV site, Richard pulled up, was able to fill up with water, and we were on our way headed to Winnipeg.
The roads in Manitoba have to be the bumpiest roads we have experienced in all of Canada! The slow lane, which we travel in, had potholes all along the right side of the road where it meets the shoulder.
We set our GPS for the Flying J in Headingly, which is just as we enter Winnipeg. We had stayed at this Flying J for a night back in November when we were driving over to Vancouver Island. It is a truck stop, but it is RV friendly, so we knew we could fill up with diesel and spend the night.
We arrived at the Flying J around 5:30pm and Richard filled us up with diesel and we looked at the time and said “Why don’t we keep driving? The roads are good, the conditions are good and we are making excellent time.” So that is exactly what we did! We kept driving....What a long day, but this big ‘push’ as Richard likes to call it gets us into Ontario and we might be able to avoid some rain which might be coming our way, which will probably slow us down a bit.
We’ve also heard that Niagara Region is dropping the vaccine age limit to 60 tomorrow, so I’m going to stay up and book ours tonight on the government website. One of the reasons why we wanted to be back in April as early as we could, was to be able to get vaccinated. Staying in B.C. any longer, would not have gotten us vaccinated and with these variants spreading, we need that vaccine as fast as we can!
And since it looks like we will be in Kenora overnight, maybe we may even get Richard a pair of sweatpants as a reminder of his road trip in Newman!
We arrived in Kenora at Canadian Tire at 8:45pm. Walmart had a no parking overnight sign and they enforce it, so we are next to a trucker in Canadian Tire. That was a 12.5 hour day for us with 3 quick stops for propane, dump tanks and take on water and to get diesel. We are happy to be back in Ontario! B.C. to Ontario in 2 days! What a ride!!!!
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