As we were gathering our things together to pack up for the next leg of our trip, I was as always responsible for getting Taz and Furrari put into their carriers. Since Taz had been the one giving us the most trouble, my habit was to collect him first.
I looked around the room, including under the bedcovers where they hung to the floor and offered a small amount of space for a cat to hide crouched next to the pedestal on which the box springs lay. He was nowhere to be found. I looked around some more, including in cabinets and drawers.
No Taz.
On previous occasions, Taz had had to be shooed away from the door when one of us was entering or leaving. Now I was worried that he had found a way to disappear from the room at some point - that he might be wandering the halls of the hotel. While Chris continued packing, I walked down to the front desk to see if anyone had reported a cat running loose in the hallways, but there had been no such report. I then wandered through the hotel myself, and then made a circuit around the building, hoping that if he somehow had gotten outside he would stay close enough that I could find him.
Still no Taz.
I returned to our room in hopes that Chris had somehow discovered him, and found her in the process of upending the mattress, saying that she thought Taz might have copied a trick Furrari had pulled five years before on the trip to Alaska.
Those pedestals on which hotel beds sit are hollow; if you pick up the box spring there’s a space underneath. Furrari had, five years ago when she pulled her disappearing act, found an opening, perhaps between the pedestal and the wall, and had hidden herself under the box spring. Taz, however, was not in this pedestal.
He was inside the box spring. And he was not happy about being discovered.
Hissing all the way, he made his way to the hole, apparently pre-existing, through which he had climbed from near the foot of the bed into the cage of the box spring. But after a few minutes he went into his carrier with substantially less fuss than he had ever created before. This incident was the beginning of the end of his determined resistance to going into his carrier, and before too many days longer his merely token resistance dwindled to token protest.
We were finally able to get going, after a fuel stop. Calgary lay ahead, then Fort Macleod, Lethbridge, and then the border. As we approached the home of the 1988 Winter Olympics, the Canadian Rockies finally began to be seen on the western horizon. And the traffic got heavier.
We managed to contend with the freeway traffic of Calgary reasonably well, until the freeway ended and we abruptly found ourselves on a congested surface road with a heavy backup in the right lane. Chris followed my lead in changing to the nearly empty left lane, and we were frozen out when we learned why the right lane was so congested: that was the route we needed to continue on our way, and the left lane was required to turn left. So we turned left, found a spot on the all but deserted stretch of road we found ourselves on, and turned around to reacquire the highway. Eventually we were headed south again toward the States.
The route from Calgary to the north end of Interstate 15 jogs eastward from Fort Macleod to Lethbridge, then heads southeast toward the tiny Canadian border town of Coutts, just across the border from Sweetgrass, Montana. We managed Fort Macleod fairly easily, but Lethbridge turned out to be a much bigger town than I would have expected, and as I had begun coming down with a cold myself I was starting to get a little out of it as we arrived. Fortunately Chris suggested a lunch break, and we found a Taco Bell that was a few blocks’ drive from the highway exit.
It was only after I had some food and drink in me that I remembered that our route number was to change in Lethbridge, and that therefore we needed to find where the new route separated from the turnpike we’d been on.
Again, as in Edmonton the day before, I took a lucky guess, and soon we were making our run for the border, where we would no longer have to pay the equivalent of $1.60 (U.S.) for a gallon of gasoline, and no longer have to convert kilometres to miles. In Lethbridge we had spent down our remaining Canadian cash to about twelve cents, a feat of which Chris was rather proud. We were ready to repatriate.
The ports of entry at Coutts-Sweetgrass lie on rolling terrain between the two communities, and with a duty-free shop smack-dab on the traffic area between the Canadian station and its U.S. counterpart, the passage was a little confused. We made it, though, and Chris again went through first. When my turn came, the Customs officer first asked me, “Where do you live?”
A little startled, I replied, “Formerly, North Pole, Alaska.” He had turned away while I answered, so I had to wait for his next question.
“Moving to...?”
“Peachtree City, Georgia.”
He asked about firearms, alcohol, cigarettes, etc., to which I replied in the negative each time, and then he asked, almost as an afterthought, “U.S. citizen?”
“Yes."
“Welcome back to the U.S. Have a nice day.”
I had avoided refueling since we left Olds, so I needed to refuel at the first opportunity. We exited I-15 at the first exit south of the border, Sweetgrass itself, and I filled my tank - at a price not all that much lower than I would have paid in Interior Alaska. That was an unpleasant surprise, but at least I got a free 44-oz. fountain drink with my fillup. And it was still quite a bit cheaper than it might have been just a hundred yards/metres away in Coutts.
Also, thanks to the fact the gas was dispensed in gallons rather than litres, I was finally able to get a good reading of my gas mileage, which proved to have gotten better by more than a mile per gallon over what I’d been getting in Alaska before we left.
This was the last leg of our day’s driving: from Sweetgrass to Great Falls. The legal speed limit in Montana is no longer that “reasonable and prudent” rule - the Legislature had changed the law in the past year or so, setting it at 75. We pegged it right there and passed the cattle ranches, salt pans, and small towns as if we were in a hurry or something.
Our hotel in Great Falls was a big operation that catered to conventions and such. We had a small room at the back of the building, but that was fine with us. Chris immediately tuned in to The Weather Channel, and although we talked about hitting the pool and jacuzzi, we stayed in the room and had pizza delivered. Also, because this was the halfway point in our journey, Chris placed a call to her mother in Chattanooga and they began planning for our arrival there in six more days.
