Our trip out of the country...day 1

We hit the road early cause we had about 800 miles to go on the first day. Guy had the trip completely planned out as far as the routes we were taking went. So this was what would happen every time we stopped...out the map would come and Guy would be checking to see how many more miles we had to go.

Our first pit stop we decided to make was in Idaho. The town was Idaho Falls and the river went right through the middle of town. The falls were amazing...I couldn't believe that so much water was running through there. We wanted to hurry and just take a few pics, but we ended up spending an hour there. That's okay, we probably won't make it there again, so enjoy it while you can.

While we were there, we captured this great pic of the temple. It was awesome and I bet that it is a great view for tourists which probably attracts them to the visitors center. Later we saw post cards with this similar pic on it, but we captured it for ourselves. So we hit the road again and not even 20 minutes from here...which was almost the middle of nowhere...my car starts to cut out and act wierd. Yeah not a great thing when you are only a few hours into an 1800 mile trip. Guy was sleeping while I was driving, so I woke him up and told him what was happening, so we pulled over on an off ramp and we checked it out. Guy found that it was a short in the wiring harness, so we wiggled it around and got back on the road. It worked for about 100 miles, then started shorting out again...by this time, we had made it to Butte, Montana. So while we were getting fuel, I ran in to buy electrical tape so we could fix it a little better, but they only had duct tape. So that is what we used. But before we even got out of town, it got worse, so we turned around and headed to the Ford dealership and tried to buy a new wiring harness which wasn't going to be cheap. The didn't have one in stock, so we headed to the parts store and bought a few things including a wrench. Yeah I am married to a mechanic who has alot of tools, but decides that it isn't important to take any with when we travel. So we fix it up and get going again, but less then 60 miles out of town, it starts acting up again. We were both frustrated with what was happening, but over the course of the next couple hours, we stopped about 10 times to wiggle the wire to make it work again. Before one of the last stops, Guy had a bright idea to use his shoe lace to hold the wire over a little and see if that would work. Well, it worked about as long as not using the shoe lace. So Guy started to fiddle with the wire more, and realized that it was actually a wire next to the one we thought. So on the side of the freeway, he tore it apart and rewired the plug it went to. And.................finally it worked. We didn't have any more car problems the rest of the trip.

So we planned on getting to Canada at about 8pm, but we didn't pull into our hotel til 11pm. Thanks to the car problems, but thank goodness Guy fixed the problem. This was at the border, which was kind of scary going across. We were so far away from home and heading to a new country. There were no mountains and we could see forever in all the directions. When the sun was going down, it took forever cause there were no mountains to dip behind.

Welcome to Alberta....