And..we are off..to head towards the GDT.

We are driving out to Coleman, where we will leave our car for the duration of the hike. After staying in Coleman overnight we will get a ride to Waterton where we will start the GDT with Toothless on July 5.

The drive out will be over several days to keep it easy on Toothless. It’s stupidly hot, our AC in our car isn’t fantastic and it can be a long drive. There’s no point in doing the drive in one day so we split it into several shorter days.

Due to the heatwave we packed very last minute. We basically had to spend the worst of it in shopping malls and public places with climate control to keep ourselves and our apartment cool. Toothless got a heat rash early on and we spent the rest of the heatwave doing everything we could to get rid of it. Yesterday was the first day of moderate temperature in almost a week; we spent the day doing almost all of our final prep, shipment of resupply packages and packing.

Stressful.

We started the drive a bit late at 10:45am, after Toothless had his morning nap. The drive started out fine and the AC blew cold.

We stopped for a break at about 1pm and after a short snack and wiggle break got back on the road. Our AC isn’t set up quite right so it doesn’t blow cool air after you turn off the engine for a short period of time. This isn’t great because it was just starting to get hot as we passed Manning Park after this.

We pushed through and got to Princeton at about 3:30pm. We checked into our motel, which we found to be very clean and comfortable, cranked on the AC and just relaxed.

Toothless crawled around and got into everything (we now have a trash can on the table and all outlets are behind tables – he unplugged the microwave and liked the beeping noise that made).

We originally wanted to camp on the way but booked hotels due to the heatwave. We had backpacking food packed (instant curry, instant rice and Sidekicks). So we made our dinners in the microwave.

The Dairy Queen is across the street so after dinner Natasha walked there and picked us up treats. She had to eat hers in the bathtub since it melted so fast on the walk back and it dripped all over.

Toothless got tired quick and is so far sleeping well.

Overall a pretty good day. We need to repair our AC on our car to get it working more consistently before we do more car camping with Toothless next year. We can manage for this trip though!