Journey to Edmonton

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I would have thought that driving to West Edmonton Mall...that the Destination would be the predominant subject of this blog...but it was the journey! We had heard about a massive weather storm moving up through the states and it was hot on our heels.

The Plan

The basic schedule of events for the day was to simply drive up to Edmonton via Calgary (to pick up a new GPS unit) and hopefully get to Edmonton by about 2pm so Lauren could have some quality waterpark time.

The Reality

We woke up to a fresh dump of powder snow in Kananaskis. Fortunately, it only made things look pretty and didn't affect driving traction at all...so it was pretty much full speed ahead into Calgary. We used Wayne's GPS to drive TomTom so that we could find GPS Central (yep...the company's name) so I could buy myself a new unit. (I'll also get the old unit replaced under warranty...but I needed one for this trip!)

Getting into Calgary proved no problems. Getting around was just as easy. Getting out a piece of cake. Edmonton here we come...dead straight highway...imagine Nullabor highway - but with snow. How hard can it be? We're well on schedule as planned.

The Black Icy Reality

I've not experienced too much black ice in my life...but this was something I wasn't entirely expecting. We were hooting along the highway at a good 130kmh on a four lane divided highway, dead straight with substantial gaps between all vehicles...all was good.

Then the car ahead of us started braking...continuously. We were gaining on him, so I thought I should slow down. I applied the brakes and the van started slowing...no problems...then the van started creeping sideways a bit....oooh ICE! So off the brakes, straighten up and reapply brakes...not so much force this time. I switched on my hazard lights to give the people behind some idea that there was a problem ahead. I was able to pull up to a complete stop a good 50-100m behind the car in front and slowly move up to him. All good.

It's not you...it's the other drivers on the road

Once we were stopped and safe, I got the shock of my life...probably a more disturbing vision than me slipping through the ice on that lake...I checked the rearview mirror and there's a car coming up on us fast....SIDEWAYS! The driver was fighting for control of the car and it was staying the lane and slewing from one side to the other. No control at all really. I was half bracing for the big bang and also keeping an eye on the traffic ahead of us....I slowly started to feed our car forward to give the other driver a bit more panic time, I still had a good buffer.

We could now see the other driver, a girl, hands flying and flipping the steering wheel frantically one way then the other getting closer and closer and at the last possible minute...her car fell off the side of the highway and spun around to face the way she'd just come. A few moments later, the whole scene was repeated in the other lane by another car who also spun off the highway into the grass in the middle safely.

We were safe from that at least...but you read about massive traffic pile-ups in these situations and I wasn't completely at ease until we saw a massive tail-back behind us of at least 50+ more cars and some substantial trucks to cushion any further incidents.

Carnage

We had no choice but to tough it out and crawl up towards Edmonton. Several 4x4's took an alternative option of heading off through some damaged fencing onto a side road to continue their trip...I wasn't confident that I wouldn't get stuck, so we stayed put. Eventually we passed the main cause of the hold-up, a car had not taken a slight corner and headed onto the other side of the highway and had a head-on collision. It was a mess! From there the highway was littered with cars that had fallen off the road and become stuck in the snow and one of those 4x4's that had taken the earlier shortcut met a grizzly end upside down in the middle of the road.

But we made it!

We made it to the mall (or should that be MAUL?) unscathed and went to find accomodation. The mall hotel was fully booked, so we had to look elsewhere. Hotels are very expensive (relatively) to other locations we've stayed at. We paid $115 for the TravelLodge which was significantly inferior to the $69 TravelLodge we had in Kamloops. This was the first hotel of many where we just couldn't get internet access either! So sorry for the slowing of blogs...and we didn't get another hotel with Internet access again until we got back to Vancouver!!!

We ended up going to the Mall for dinner and possibly a movie. All the restaurants were fully booked too and it was just seething. So we toughed it out in the food court which was OK and wandered around looking at everything and headed back to the hotel room vowing to get out of Edmonton as early as possible the next day!

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