Day 1: MSP to Banff

What better way to start a 3 month trip than a 23 hour drive that consisted of 21 hours of flatland nothingness and 2 hours of pitch black early morning mountain driving?

I took off at 8am promptly (by promptly I mean about 6 minutes after the hour). By 8:50 I had made it to my first stop, Rogers, MN to pick up Mason. I have a reputation in Masons family for being late so his dad was in shock that I beat them there. By 9:15 we were off to the races.

Fast forward to our first stop: Sonic - Fargo, ND. We couldn’t break the UMD Alpine tradition and were specifically thinking of Mark and Sam while we ate. After Fargo we found out the biggest drawback to this trip was going to be gas mileage. Turns out loading the truck with 6 pairs of skis and gear to live out of for 3 months while mounting a Thule box, a spare tire and having heavy Wrangler Duratracs on your truck, all while driving into the wind means about 13mpg instead of my usual 17-20.

When we hit the Canadian Border At 8:30 things went a little south. Due to a recent cold I was fighting, I had a coughing attack while going through the Canadian Customs process. The customs agent was very talkative and friendly when he saw I had been in Ireland when he was there last May. After verifying a bunch of our information, we were on our way out of middle of nowhere North Dakota and into middle of nowhere Canada.

Fast foreward about 10 hours, a couple driver swaps and 2 close calls with running out of gas. We finally made it to Banff at 7am.