Introduction to our 2018 trip


In December 2015 we came up with this idea of traveling across Canada with our 2 kids in the Festiva with a camping trailer. The original plan was to build the trailer during the summer, fix up my red Festiva that winter and leave spring 2017. I ended up picking a very time consuming method of building the trailer and didn't finish that summer. When it came time to work on the car I realized it was too rusty to be worth the effort required and had to buy another one. It took a while to find a rust free Festiva in Alberta and I didn't have time to finish it by the spring either. I worked on the trailer all summer 2017 and the car most of the winter, now its spring 2018 and we are rushing to finish both the car and the trailer. Hopefully they will both be ready to go Monday June 4!

We hope to visit with people we know along the way: family, old friends, trailer building enthusiasts that have helped me on this project, festiva enthusiasts that helped me with the car. If you would like to see us/our car/our trailer and chat for a few minutes or hours that would be great! If you want to offer us a place to shower and fill our water containers that would be awesome too! Send myself or my wife a message and we will try to arrange it with you. We have a pretty good idea of when we will be in certain areas, but traveling this far with 2 small kids may end up being less predictable than we are hoping.

The photos below are our basic planned route but I couldn't set enough points on google maps to make it exact. If you're on or near it let us know. If you don't have time for a visit but have suggestions of what we should see that would be great as well!

We hope to leave June 4, 2018, be in Houston and Smithers area before the end of the week, Prince Rupert around the 17th, getting into the Yukon on the 21st, Alaska the 27th, take the top of the world highway into Dawson and then come back down to Kananaskis in Alberta for a festiva meet at Wedge Pond July 14, into Saskatchewan the 16th, and Manitoba the 21st, Ontario July 27. We have not planned dates too specifically after that, but you can see in the photos where we plan to go.

Originally we were going into the Northwest Territories, were going to see more of northern Newfoundland and Quebec, go down to Vancouver and south central B.C but had to cut those out of our plans because of time restraints.
This should be an exciting and fun adventure for both the kids and us. Canada is a big country with lots to see, do and learn. 




This was a family photo we took in the spring of 2016 shortly after we started work on the trailer.


We took this family photo today! Shawn is 4 1/2 and Joshua turned 3 a few days ago. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finally visiting a ghost town! and photos of the inside of our trailer

Image
Monday before we packed up I finally took some photos of the inside of the trailer since so many people have asked about it. Its messy, but here you go: Bed slats for the air mattress.  We put a 3in thick gel/foam mattress topper on top of this and then bed sheets and quilts but I do not have a photo of that. We don't leave it this messy when its down and we are driving, that's just when I took the photo. I will try to get photos with the bed set up later but here is a video of the trailer lifting up and down as well  https://youtu.be/vjKTVDBH20g  I tried to wash the engine oil off the trailer at the campsite carwash but it didn't work very well without soap. It seems to be a common thing in the north for carwashes to not have soap. The campsite had coin laundry facilities which were out of order and when i came down the hill to wash the car there was a festiva there! The electrician repairing the laundry uses a festiva as a work vehicle. We talked quite a
Read more

Top of the World Highway to Dawson City

Image
Friday July 6 We slept till 8:20 because we were tired when we woke up to our alarm. Julie had a very hard time getting out of bed but we packed up our camp quickly and i got Shawn up to go get our free breakfast. I thought we could just grab it and go but it was a sit down thing while the hosts watched you eat... A marketing ploy to get the rest of the family that didn't win inside to buy breakfast. It was really good-2 huge sourdough pancakes, reindeer sausage and eggs. Shawn took forever to finish his because it was a big meal and he was distracted by everything going on in the building. It was $23 worth of breakfast but cost us quite a few hours of time- it was 10:30 before we left town. Julie and Joshua had our planned breakfast back at the campsite since there wasn't really anything on the menu that she could have with her dietary restrictions anyway. The start of the top of the world highway was really steep right away. I turned onto it and couldn't get out
Read more

Leaving and our first 2 days

Image
Friday was my last day of work, I worked late that evening on the car to finish a few things and then came home. Julies family came out to help us get ready on Saturday afternoon and Monday morning which was great!  The entire day Saturday was spent sewing zipper to the screen for our trailer by Julie, as was all day Monday. Monday evening we went to install it and realized we were short on zipper so I went to town but couldn't find any. Tuesday we packed the rest of everything else and left at 1:30pm. The original plan was to leave at 6am Monday so this was a day and a half late and we had no working screen to keep bugs out of the trailer even though I changed the plan from screening the entire trailer to just doing the door to save time. Our plan was to find screen along the way. So after packing and then unpacking to reduce weight we left Tuesday afternoon from our home in Buford Alberta still packed pretty heavy. Drove through drayton valley, up to highway 16 and into E
Read more