The road goes ever on

We’re hitting the road again this summer – last summer’s road was so much fun we’ve decided to embrace the adventure again! Last summer we drove north through Yellowstone then east to Chicago for the July 4 holiday and drove home via Route 66. Our mistake was that we had to be in Chicago by a certain date so the front end of the trip was pretty rushed – and we also discovered that national parks in the U.S. are not particularly dog-friendly. This year we don’t have any time pressure and we’ve decided to go north into Canada (which has a much more dog-friendly park system) and then drive west from Calgary to the coast and follow the coastline all the way home.

We are going to pretty much book it to the border, stopping in St. George UT, Logan UT, and Butte MT. We’ll be moteling all the way to Canada then plan to tent camp a good bit across Alberta and British Columbia. Last summer was enormously fun but the drive home along Route 66 got pretty darned hot and humid so after Missouri we stayed in motels as it was just too hot in the tent for Maggie and me. We anticipate better weather this trip since we’ll be much further north. And since neither one of us has explored much of Canada other than Vancouver and Victoria there will be loads of new sites to see. And Maggie will get to add new states and a whole new country to the list of places she’s traveled.

This weekend we are getting organized. We went to the Container Store and bought a clear weathertight trunk that fits perfectly in the back of the Subaru and holds all of our campground stuff (kitchen, cleaning, etc) and can double as a seat or table in the tent. We keep all of the bulky camping gear in the yakima skybox (tent, chairs, pillows, tarp). We learned some good lessons last summer so feel a bit more prepared and organized this year. Our tent is a 6-person Coleman (I don’t know how you’d fit 6 people in there, other than stacking them) and it fits us and Maggie quite well. it’s not one of their “fast pitch” tents – which means we can have it mostly set up in about 5 minutes. This year I got a portable commode for camping since I do NOT like wandering around campgrounds in the middle of the night looking for the rest room. We have a go bag for Maggi that has all of her needs (including waterless shampoo for those time when she, say, rolls in a pile of poo somewhere) in an easy to carry bag. So all in all, we are feeling prepped — laissez les bons temps rouler!