Woke up this morning to Mountain Goats on the hillside outside the hotel.
Today is the long day of driving, punctuated by prison. Out of the hotel at 8am for the 2 hour drive to Shelby to visit Steve. 45 minute stop for breakfast and blogging in Cut Bank (and fixing the Art Party website which for some reason lost all it’s navigation).
Would like to leave 1sh so I can have time to cook dinner tonight outside Banff while its still light. This eating in restaurants is expensive, and I tend to cook better and healthier. Another couple of games of life and chatting about his life behind bars, the hell of getting a social security card replaced (while behind bars), the fact that his license hasnt been suspended they didnt charge him with DWI (of DUI), what living with Lewis and his wife will be like on parole, how I could use him on my house projects. He comes up for parole in July and my thoughts are with his success.
Shelby has good T-Mobile service, and the Sprint Broadband is Digital Roaming which I hope is not going to bit me on my next bill. Please no more China and Australia T-Mobile bills!
More about the border crossing. The routeisstraight up I-15 to the border where it turns into
Gorgeous drive — if the damn computer wouldn’t keep overheating and shutting itself off about a half a mile before I need to make critical turns. Might be time for a Mark Graf laptop tuneup. At the moment it is sitting on three diet coke screw-off lids to keep some airflow under the thing — it’s even been crapping out just sitting on a table.
On to Canmore (Banff is actually up the road). Why is it that every ski village looks like every other ski village and every beachfront resort looks like every other beachfront resort. That said, Canmore has been around for a hundred years — the downtown, not the condos on the hills — so it at least has a little character.
The WorldMark Canmore units are small — more like residential suites, which according to Microsoft Streets and Trips is what this used to be. I think Marriott owns the other building. So, I’m in a one-bedroom, with a tiny kitchen (no stove, but full size dishwasher, and washer/dryer down the hall) tastefully decorated with a flat screen in the bedroom and a honking 30″ in the living room, luckily on a swivel. Safeway is in the town center to off I go for steaks and salad — and damned if Safeway doesn’t have a liquor and wine store right next door, open until 11pm on a Sunday. These Albertans — so civilized.
Great view from my windows, however….
Dinner and mucking around with their Internet by the day box. $4.95 for twenty four hours — it’s one of those plug in devices that runs over the power lines. I can’t get photos to upload worth a damn — I’ll try Twango in the morning, maybe its just a WordPress thing.
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