Rocky Crossing...

Rocky Crossing…

We’re in the Rockies, in Jasper. It took a good few hours, but we cleared almost 500km today…

Jasper’s on the other side of the Rockies, in Alberta. It’s the first time I’ve driven across a time zone which hasn’t involved going into France. France doesn’t really count, since it’s the same latitude as most of the UK.

We spent the previous evening in Kamloops, which is a place you go to in order to get to somewhere else. Having said that, it does have a curry house, which is pretty cosmopolitan I suppose. It also has a pretty good bar, which we made sure to thoroughly test before passing out in the grimy, stinking motel we’d found.

A late start this morning began with a quick check of the health of the Beast’s engine. The Lincoln Continental has been attracting lots of double-takes, a few positive comments and some requests for photo ops. Even so – it is almost as old as I am and has a load of roof insulation in the engine to hold a loose gasket in place and a fair bit of duct tape on the front bumper.

In the Rockies, there’s no radio and no mobile ‘phone reception. If your car dies out here, so do you. Thankfully, the Beast saw us right through to Jasper.

We come through some fairly odd places. There was Avola, which advertised a promising-looking diner, but turned out to be a town bereft of people but filled with yapping dogs and empty houses.

There was also Blue River, which had a great grill, but some weird inbred-looking chef. Was that a beefburger or a human burger?

The Rockies are a weird mixture of desolate and beautiful. Sometimes, you’re right in the clouds and can see them floating through the trees. It’s incredible.

On roadtrips, you get to ponder and contemplate a wide variety of things, but I won’t go into those. Sometimes the space to think is welcome. Sometimes it isn’t.

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