Jasper toward Vancouver

Thursday-Friday, September 1-2

We woke up Thursday morning and it was only 32 degrees Fahrenheit at 08.30 in the morning - Brrrrrrr! This morning I turned on the furnace, not just the heat pump. I put on my hat and gloves and kept the warm tights on to walk the dog in the morning! Wow – welcome to September in the Canadian Rockies!  

Auggie and I broke camp quickly and drove the few kilometers up to Lake Annette, a “kettle lake” formed by one of the many glaciers eons ago. Again, this scenery is so stunningly beautiful, it looks like it is in Disneyworld made out of plastic.

Around our quick walk at Lake Annette, we also saw a pond of quicksand, for the first time in our lives! (No, we did not go into it!)

After a lazy lunch break and a few phone calls, we started our way west, onward to Vancouver. But first, how bout this beautiful river as we left Jasper???

It’s a long way to Vancouver (bout 10 hours or so), so we broke it into chunks. We made an overnight stop at Kamloops, British Columbia (where we are now officially in Pacific time zone). Then it was on again for the drive closer to Vancouver and the Pacific Ocean.

We took the scenic route and were again rewarded. More twisty, turny roads (weeeeeeeee!), lots of elevation gain and drop and more beautiful snowy mountain peaks, lakes and valleys. Wow again!

I did need to stop and let my brakes cool down as we were nearing the end of the twisty-turny 150+-km up-and-down route. The steering wheel had started to shake when I applied the brakes! Not being mechanical but knowing immediately that was not a good thing, I pulled off, had some lunch and called my friend, Scott, who knows a heck of a lot more than I do about mechanical things.

He agreed that stopping was a good thing, gave me some tips as to how to drive the next section with my brakes in mind, and then he suggested getting into a shop to have them looked at as soon as I could, just to make sure all was in order. (Yikes – it’s Friday of the long Labor Day weekend. This might be tricky.)

We got out of the mountains safely and drove down to Squamish, where we found a campsite for two nights. A bit unsettled by more mechanical concerns, I cooked dinner and went to sleep with the goal of trying to find a garage that could give my brakes a look in the morning.