Baja Bound - Day 1

This is what we left behind.
Actually the highway was pretty good until we were about an hour from home and turned south. Its was horrible! Nathanael said at one point "only an idiot would be out on this road"...I replied "it takes a special kind of idiot to attempt pulling a trailer out on it!" Self depricating humor helped lighten the tense atmosphere a little.
By the time we hit the snow we were in the middle of no where...literally. No towns for hours. We averaged about 40km/hr for the next 5 hours. We prayed and white knuckled our way through. We made to Medicine Hat Alberta ready to call it a day but the highway and weather cleared up from there. So on we went vowing to get as far away from winter as possible.

The kids doing their school work in the car. It worked great since there isn't a whole lot of distractions or other things to do.

Finally in a city after 5 hours of no mans land.
The trailer was a little worse for wear and so were our nerves.

Silas was a great traveller considering we drove for 14 hours the first day. I came stocked with lots of cheese sticks, raisins and crackers.
He was happy just playing with his toys. Around noon, once the kids school work was done I brought out a goodie bag for each of them. I made them up after a trip to the dollar store. The bags had a fruit snack or little treat, a few little dollar store toys, a comic book, maze or activity book etc. It gave them something to look forward to each day and offered hours of entertainment. We saved the dvd player for times when we really needed it....that way they didn't get bored of it.

We called it a day at about 10pm in a Wal-mart parking lot. We discovered shortly after arriving for the night in northern Montana that our propane furnace was only going to work while plugged in...for some reason we didn't have enough battery power to run the fan. At least thats our suspicion. Since we were just parked in a parking lot with no power, water etc. I turned on the stove for a few minutes to take the edge off, bundled the kids up and got a few hours sleep. The trailer was freezing in the morning!...literally.
Fortunately we got as far south as we could the next night and stayed much warmer. :)