Canmore - 51°N 115°W

By -
With so many plans cancelled due to COVID and summer coming to an end, we needed an adventure. So we decided to drive across Canada from Canmore to Gaspésie in Québec. Not quite all the way across, we know, but certainly a respectable portion.

We are taking the blue route - still a very long drive!


Our plan is to scurry across the Prairies and meet Sue and Rick at Sue’s family camp just north of Thunder Bay. After a visit, we plan to explore a couple of Provincial Parks along the shores of Lake Superior before meeting Adrienne and Ray at Adrienne’s cabin on Kawagama Lake. Following some R&R, we will continue east along the great St Lawrence Seaway exploring as we go until we run out of country at Gaspé Peninsula. The Maritimes are out-of-bounds due to COVID so Québec is our turnaround. Then it’s back to Kawagama Lake and onto Ray’s family camp in Atikokan (Ontario) followed by a trundle back across the Prairies.


We equipped our mighty Odyssey for the odyssey.  She now sports a sleeping platform with a cosy bed, bins and baskets of all the goods and utensils we could possibly need and a hatch tent to provide shelter from rain and bugs should the conditions not be perfect.

Sleeping platform built!  Now, for a mattress ...


The view from the pillow with the hatch closed

All packed neatly away

A quick test of our hatch tent


One of the best features of this outing is that there are very few time-dependant targets for us to work around.  If we happen upon some place that requires more exploration, we can linger.

Let's see what central and eastern Canada has in store for us!

Comments

Post a Comment

Check out our most popular posts!

Moving Aboard - 49° 38' 27" N 01° 37' 00" E

By Kate and Sean -
Image
Wow, that was a big week.  We are exhausted. ... and smitten! Monday was a paperwork day, but aboard Chinook.  We went over the contract, item by item, to ensure that everything the contract stated would be delivered.  There were a few things missing or incomplete (mixups in ordering, vendor delivery timing issues) but they were noted with written assurances that they would be delivered, changed out or corrected.  This all needed to be clearly stated before we transfer the lion's share of the purchase amount to Garcia. Signing and double-checking the contract Anything that wasn't in place, was incomplete or not working properly would be dealt with by the warranty team.   There was no refuting that they had delivered A boat. We had no idea how she sailed and there was no way that a single day of inspection would allow anyone to check every bit of the more-than-5000-person-hours of labour that went into this sleek looking vessel. The "Grin and Grab" p
Read more

Leaving Chinook and heading back to Canada - 49° 38' 27" N 01° 37' 00" E

By Kate and Sean -
Image
 Yep, you read correctly.  Our plans have changed, as plans often do and our 2024 is looking somewhat different from what we wrote in a previous post - A Rough Plan for 2024 .  Chinook will be left safe and sound at Port Chantereyne Marina - with her Garcia friends! We still plan to head to the UK and Ireland after Easter and will spend until mid-June cruising around, exploring the area and putting Chinook through her paces.  Our plan is to sail to Alderney, just off the coast of Normandy, on Easter Monday or Tuesday.  It is a short hop but has some major tides that can run up to 10kn so we need to time our departure well.  We bought the "Aurigny' (Alderney to the English-speakers) courtesy flag from the local chandlers here in Cherbourg We will then cross the English Channel to Portsmouth and work our way west along the coast of England to Wales and Scotland before heading south along the eastern Irish coast.  We need to be back in Cherbourg by mid-June for the 3-month warran
Read more

Garcia Boatyard - 49° 38' 48" N 01 35' 47" E

By -
Image
When we rocked up to the Garcia office for our Monday morning meeting, we couldn't help but notice that a mast-less Exploration 45 was parked outside the shed door where we had previously seen our hull parked.  Could this be o-u-r boat? Nice boat.  Could it be ours??? Marie, our project manager, confirmed that it was our boat!  Although we had come to the yard to put the Boat Show goodies that we had acquired into Garcia-provided storage, we were meeting with Christophe, the after-sales guy to go over spare parts and after-delivery emergency equipment that we were putting on our order.  We would not be getting a look ON BOARD this marvellous aluminium creature.  We would just be admiring through the meeting room window.  Our boat tour was tomorrow. The next day, we had mistakenly thought that the meeting was at 11 am, rather than the scheduled 10 am.  at 10:15 we received a text message from a puzzled Marie.  "Are you coming for the meeting?  Don't you want to
Read more