2012/07 Western Canada trip - Retrospective |
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I made this this rough map of the entire trip for our web site, so I thought I might as well include it here too. If you should ever contemplate a trip like this, consider some of the statistics. The distance between Jasper and Carlsbad as the crow flies is about 1600 miles, and a direct trip on the road is about 2000. But we totalled 12000 miles on our trip. Ten weeks sounds like plenty of time for doing this, but it means driving an average of 3-4 hours every day, not a big deal, but it has to be in the back of your mind whenever you are tempted to stay put for another day.
Retrospective
John and Edna had told us that this was going to be their last trip to North America, so we tried to pack in as much scenery and wildlife as possible.
Did we get to everywhere we`d planned? That’s hard to say, as we had a number of alternate routes, dependent on the weather. The rain drove us off the coast in Oregon, only for us to freeze up in the mountains, but I think that the deep snow around Crater Lake was one of the high spots of their trip. We didn’t get to Lassen, one of John’s requests, as the park’s roads were still closed with snowfall. We never got back to the coast as the weather in Yosemite and the rest of the Sierra Nevada improved and there was too much to see there.
We skipped some of the parks like Organ Pipe, down on the Mexican border, in favour of cooler spots in Utah, but overall the heat was probably our biggest problem. Carlsbad Caverns were on our list to visit, and to get there we had to go south; our route took us through some interesting places like Saguaro and White Sands, but they can be very hot in the summer months. If we’d realized that our visit to Carlsbad would coincide with the American West’s worst heat wave and drought in decades then we wouldn’t have gone there.
I was also a bit surprised at how much the heat affected us. I knew Sandie would be hiding from the desert sun as she burns easily, but I expected that John and Edna, used to traveling in Australia’s desert heat, would be OK with it. They would all have enjoyed the trip more if the temperatures had been closer to normal, in the nineties rather than the hundreds.
Would starting a month later have helped? There was much discussion of this, particularly when we were in the snowstorm at Lava Beds! It would have helped on our trip from Hope down to California, but going later in the year means waterfalls dry up, crowds increase, and in most places July’s temperatures usually exceed June’s. In retrospect, we should probably have met John and Edna off the plane in Los Angeles in May and then made our way north as the weather warmed up.
So how did the equipment hold up? The answer is surprisingly well after 12000 miles in ten weeks, most of it in mountainous country. The truck’s front tyres were trashed, but at four years old that wasn’t a disaster. Other than that the truck ran perfectly, even on dirt roads. The camper body had some wear and tear with a damaged clearance light and vent stack, but that happens every year when I drive too close to trees! The Little Guy suffered a light failure, fixed under warranty, and its jack post was ground off by road contact. I should probably have fitted a step-up hitch block to make the trailer ride level but then we couldn’t have unfolded the steps up to the camper, so it was a trade-off.
Would we do it all again? No, obviously not. We’ll do something different next time!