Me And My Ambulance

Sounds like a new blog title, right?  But don’t you worry. No changes will be done to the blog title. After all, people from all over have found this blog just by typing “American” “Travel” “Blog” in any possible combination. Who would look for me and my ambulance anyway? But l do receive local looks whenever and where ever I pop up in this vehicle. The young German lady I met up at the Banff gondola, thought it was “cool” to drive an ambulance for private use.  But then, anything outside of normal seems to be “cool” these days. Today I noticed a father and his young daughter crossing the parking lot at Safeway. I’m not much of a lip reader but I could see that when he looked over to my van he talked to his daughter about the ambulance. I had my first towing experience with it today. See, dumping was canceled the other day because of frozen slide-outs. When there is ice around the edges they cannot be moved. And ice there was plenty of. Today, when I was back from my latest bus drive with 11 Chinese, it was snowing so bad that I had problems seeing the road. Within minutes we had 3-4 inches of snow. But back to the towing. The ambulance pulls the trailer like a charm. My heavy-duty sway bars (I do love them…) keep the van from dragging it’s tail along the road. Will try to get a pic of it tomorrow. The roads got slick and many cars had ended up in the ditches in southern Alberta. But the ice on the trailer was gone and I just had to climb on the very slippery roof to get the snow off it. Then I was ready to move to a new spot. And why that? Canada Parks has this funny rule that nobody can stay longer than 14 days. And I was already at the end of my third week. It was only permitted, because of the frozen and rather immovable trailer. Since the trailer hadn’t had its federal inspection after importation to Canada, I needed to move over to Canmore and the local Canadian Tire facility. They are the ones having contracted with the Registrar Of Imported Motor Vehicles (RIV) to do federal inspections.  And since I needed to go to Canmore, I chose a former municipal RV-Park for a couple of days. The park is NOT nice as it is located right beside the Trans Canada Highway. The noise there reminds me of any Interstate rest area. Nevertheless, the charge is $35 Bucks a night, no water, no sewer, an unusable WIFI, uneven sites  -  just 30 amps of power. Showers have to be paid extra. The “unserviced” sites ($25) they advertised, were for tents and were located between some bushes on uneven ground. With other words a genuine rip-off place. But it’s Canmore-style, that’s for sure. Good thing with this new location: Mc.Donalds can be reached by foot as it is just a stone throw away. Bea thought that I have grown into a true McDonalds customer. The power of the WIFI – there you have it. While waiting for my group at the Chateau Lake Louise these “buses” came to pick up their passengers. As you can see, it was raining – a lot! Having WIFI, has grown into a commodity everyone expects to find just about everywhere. A place with no WIFI is almost shunned today. While I was parked outside the Save-On-Foods store today, I found that the market offers a very fast WIFI service. Logically,  many people are using the store and check their emails from the comfort of their campers or cars. Guess that’s enough ramblin’ for one day. Thanks again for hanging in here.