First Roadtrip of 2011 - West Edmonton mall

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the with the weather in this part of the world, let me tell you that the Winters are a little chilly.  Our last trip in the trailer was mid November and it was about zero degrees.  As soon as the temperatures drop down into the minuses, we tend to Winterize our trailers.  This isn't a massive job but it does involve removing all the water and replacing it with an antifreeze solution and removing batteries.

The third week in November we Winterized and Zingy stayed in that frozen state until mid February when we pumped out all the antifreeze and took her out for the first trip of the year.

As usual, as soon as we had finished work on the Friday night we hitched up and headed North.  The plan was to get as far as Red Deer and shut down for the night, getting into Edmonton on Saturday round about mid morning.

All went well as we approached Red Deer but disaster struck when we parked up in a turn-out for the night.  Before we set off that evening I had set the furnace because I knew it was going to be cold that night.  Unfortunately the battery charger had failed and the furnace had killed the battery.  I opened the trailer door to be met with darkness and an icy blast.  The temperature inside and out was minus ten degrees, that was one freezing cold night, fully clothed and under all the quilts and blankets.

The next morning we called into a trailer dealership and they fixed the problem which took about 5 seconds.  Like I always say, "You never stop learning when you are camping".

So anyway, we got to the Glowing Embers Campsite, incidentally with a name like Glowing Embers you would have thought that they would have had great campfires, funnily enough campfires were not allowed on the site, not that it really bothered us in that weather.

There's not really much to tell about the campsite, we couldn't see much because there was about four feet of snow and the individual sites had to be dug out.  Most of the weekend was spent in the West Edmonton Mall which indeed was the sole purpose of the visit.

You would have thought that we would have saved money by not using hotel rooms but to be honest, when you add up the extra cost in fuel (8mpg towing) and the small cost of the campsite ($30 per night if i remember correctly) then it all balances out.

On the way down we hit some horrendous weather which managed to get Zingy absolutely filthy so it was a trip into the truck wash when we got back to Lethbridge, also we must have used about 60 lbs of propane just keeping the trailer warm.