Breakdown Town

Short Version:
We get stuck in Dead Man's Flats, a man with ginger mo comes to the rescue, we play at an old Olympic site, and we say farewell to the Rockies

Long Version:
The squirrel had stayed unbowed and defiant right up to bedtime, dodging thrown cones and taunting us with tree-trunk acrobatics. And he'd started again first thing in the morning. His palpable anger was entertaining initially, but became tiresome and eventually irritating. We began to question the wisdom of having children, but decided that making life choices next to HT powerlines at a place called Dead Man's Flats might not be the smartest thing we've ever done, so we packed up camp and plotted our route to the Nordic Centre, a few km up the Trans-Canada Highway at Canmore.

On our way down the Icefield Parkway we'd passed 18000km since driving the Reaper off Sid the Used-Car Salesman's lot back in May, and 3000km since leaving Vancouver a few weeks ago. We'd done and had done a bunch of work on it initially, and since then it's refused to need much physical loving: one oil and oil-filter change after the great southern loop; fuse replacements for the horn/radio/12v-power every couple of months; oil and transmission fluid levels checked every so often and found to be A-OK. So when turning the key in the ignition produced dash lights but nothing else, we were taken aback. The Reaper doesn't not go, it goes!

Not today, it doesn't.

No clicks, no turning-over, nothing. Radio cut out as usual, but that was the only effect. Hood up; nothing obviously disconnected; bafflement.

Up the road to Thunderstone Quarry, then, to a borrowed phone and a call to the Alberta AA*, which involved long periods on hold while the guy worked the non-Albertan membership number through his systems. He eventually called the AA in NZ, and came back on the line to me to say they still hadn't figured it out, but he'd send a tow-truck our way anyway. I was surprised at that, as in NZ they send a mechanic - often semi-retired when outside major metropolitan areas - who has a crack at fixing the issue. A tow-truck is only called as a last resort. Here it's the other way around. So I said my goodbyes to the Thunderstoners** and biked back to the derelict Reaper, where Lovely Wife had made a delicious coffee.

We were still drinking when a flipping enormous flatbed truck arrived and parked at the top of the powerline access road. The driver wasn't a tall man, but he had a great (and great big) ginger moustache and a bald head under his baseball cap. We liked him immediately, right up to the point where he said there was no way he'd be able to get his truck down to where the Reaper was. He came for a walk down the track anyway, and despite avowals that he was just a driver, not a mechanic, asked about symptoms and what we'd tried so far. And then he started the van. Loose neutral safety switch. Really common on older Chevy, Dodge and GMC vehicles, apparently. Holding the gear-shift in Neutral in just the right place, and holding your tongue just right, essentially tricks the transmission into allowing ignition. Sweet.

Reaper tricked, off to the Nordic Centre, which had:
- a huge Canadian flag
- lots and lots of XC ski and bike trails
- a bike skills park with excellent dirt jumps
- a disc golf course
- lakeside picnic tables
- a biathlon training race in progress, with competitors on wheeled training skis
- sun-kissed high mountain peaks

We used as many of the facilities as we could fit into the afternoon, then made our way into town to the Grizzly's Paw Brewing Company, where we bought some Grumpy Bear Honey Wheat Beer before setting off to Banff for a looksee*** and then onwards, down out of the Rockies. Past a scary-looking runaway-truck run-off lane; passed on the right on a narrow viaduct by a scary big black pickup truck; past the town of Field, which looked welcoming in the dusk with its lights glowing; into and through Golden, to the forest, where our hitherto reliable free camping guidebook sent us completely off track. We ended up parked in the dark 700m down a dirt track off a Fire Service Road, and slept most of the night before being woken by pounding rain on the roof of the Reaper at 0430, which had us up and about and moving the van to a less-muddy spot before we ended up trapped somewhere we shouldn't be.






* = The NZ Automobile Association has a reciprocal agreement with both the Canadian and Amerikan AAs, which is kind of handy

** = One of them was quite interested in my speculation that the 4x4 from the previous evening might have been checking a pot plantation: "If it's on our land that means it's ours."

*** = Tourist town. Like Queenstown would be if it had more money. Gas was 8c/litre more expensive than it had been in Canmore, 22km away